


Atlas

by orphan_account



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M, Masturbation, Pacific Rim AU, Strong Language, a lot of emphasis on character development or somethin, angry idiots getting in a fight
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-16
Updated: 2014-02-01
Packaged: 2018-01-08 23:42:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 24,896
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1138849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That's what Jaeger pilots do. They share the load.<br/><em>You cannot bear the burden of the sky on your own, Jean.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. five years

It had been five years.

Jean could never settle comfortably in his sleep; wild thoughts and uncomfortable anxiety ran around and kicked his heart until it pounded inside his chest. Whenever he did sleep, he would see the same dream over and over again, the same pain and unbending exertion that gripped his muscles, the same fear and panic and desperation that flooded his system over and over again, the same yell cut off by the pounding of the waves and the grinding of mechanics and the hiss of flying sparks and the roar of the monster in front of them. Always the same dream, and it haunted him over and over until he woke up trying not to scream, because he’d had more than enough screaming for a lifetime.

Sweat sliding down his cold skin, he’d close his eyes and instinctively reach out with his mind, looking for that warm, comforting presence, soft laughter and freckles scattered like constellations, a voice like mellow butter, the embrace of his partner, but his partner was gone, and he would be left, empty, unable to even cry.

They didn’t bury him. There was no body to bury. The ocean was his grave, deep and cold and unforgiving, and the only memorial he had of his best friend, his partner in combat and out, were his phantom Drifting dreams, marching in the Jaeger in unison. That and the well-worn picture in his pocket, which he’d wrap his fingers around when he needed something to hold him down, hold his emotions down. He couldn’t let himself get emotional about Marco any more than he needed to. _People die every day. What’s Marco to the tons who die already, thanks to the kaiju?_

He tried to escape inland, get away from the ocean—he couldn’t stand the sight of giant metal figures resting in their bays, the silhouette of the Anchorage Shatterdome on the broad coastline, the ocean pounding away at the shores (they probably carried a little bit of Marco in its waters; he dared not put his feet there)—but the war had depleted their resources so thoroughly that he was forced to work on the Anti-Kaiju Wall for rations. He didn’t mind it that much. Not many wanted to work on the top of the wall; even if it paid better, more people died. It was easier to fall, farther to fall, and then you would be gone, and another person would take your spot.

Jean wasn’t afraid of falling. Falling is the easiest thing you can do. Anyone can fall. But having someone in your heart, ripped away from you in the moment you needed that person most—he vowed never to do that again. So he never spoke deeply to anyone, only mumbled “hello” or “good-bye,” nothing revealing, just the common courtesy. The loneliness working in construction was comforting: it was just him, sitting on the beam, soldering metal to metal, the cold wind blowing across his ears while he tried not to think about how the sparks that flew were the same as the sparks that flew as his beloved Atlas Reaper went down, as the plates of iron fell off the Jaeger into the sea, as he pummeled the damn monster while his muscles screamed under the effort, like he was holding up the entire sky on his shoulders, pain shooting down muscles and tendons and bones all the way down his toes.

He couldn’t do that again.

That’s what he says to Marshall Smith’s sharp, imposing blue eyes. _There are surely other pilots out there, better than me._ And the Marshall studies him with those imposing blue eyes, shards of cutting blue crystal, and the Marshall asks him—

“Where would you rather die, Mr. Kirstein? Here? Or in  Jaeger?”

And Jean opens his mouth to say “ _With all due respect, on the wall, sir_ ” but then he remembers. How strange it is right then, when he, while standing under the rubble and dust of the half-built kaiju wall, remembers drifting with Marco, throwing punch after punch and racking up kaiju kills (seven in total, three team and four solo)—like he is suited up again, in the Conn-Pod again, mind melded with partner and machine. He is Marco’s steadfast determination (something he wouldn’t have expected from such a gentle demeanor), he is Marco’s sense of duty, the unwavering compass,  and then he knows what he had to do, as bitter as the words taste in his mouth.

“I’ll come.”

***

He doesn’t know what he expected. His eyes drink in the sights of the Shatterdome hungrily, and he can nearly Marco’s presence next to him, just like when they entered the Shatterdome for the first time, fresh out of the Academy. It all looks painfully the same: the arching height of the ceiling, the clatter of people in trucks carrying things, and of course, sparks flying from the Jaegers as they stand proudly in their bays, the familiar grayish-green walls of concrete that is ever-present in all Shatterdomes—after all, they are built for functionality, not comfort.  Comfort is a luxury no one can afford nowadays.

“We only have five Jaegers left; the rest have all been decommissioned or destroyed in combat,” says the Marshall, walking briskly, and Jean hurries to keep up, adjusting his backpacks, neck craning to gaze at all of the Jaegers Marshall Smith pointed out. There is Laurel Reliant, the only Mark 5 Jaeger in service, the fastest but without compensating in durability and defense, with the quickest-loading plasma cannons to date, piloted by the legendary Captain Levi (no one knows his last name and no one needs to know. He is simply Levi; the name foreshadows an intimidating presence of a small but bitter man, a steely-tempered veteran Jaeger pilot whose kaiju kill record is unparalleled) and his partner Petra Ral (she is kinder than her co-pilot, opposite in temperament but matching in height, and yet she still is known better for being as fierce and proud and deadly in combat as a lion). As Jean and the Marshall pass by, the pilots of Laurel Reliant stride out, sweaty and in loose-fitting athletic clothes, obviously fresh out of combat training session. The Marshall gives a curt nod to them, which they return. Shivers run up and down Jean’s spine; their presence is awe-inspiring but intimidating—he had been a good pilot ( _and he still is,_ he reminds himself fiercely) but Levi and Petra are on a completely different level altogether.

Further in, past swarms and swarms of people and trucks and boxes and crates, is Zero Epsilon, Mark 4, one of the finest, and next to the robot, its pilots Erd Gin and Gunter Shultz play a one-on-one game of basketball, but it is a never-ending game; they are perfectly matched in movement, one never getting the better of the other—when Erd moves, Gunter moves there, and Erd tries to move elsewhere, but Gunter is there too, smiling slightly, and they continue, the steady beat of the basketball against the concrete providing the tempo for their dance. It isn’t an uncommon sight; playing basketball exercises mental and physical ability, and also forces you to read your opponent and anticipate what your opponent will do—ideal for pilots, who need that to save lives. Jean swallows hard, his mind instinctively reaching for that empty space, for that gentleness, the steady, steadfast nature, but he stops himself again, _there is nothing there._

He purses his lips. What a farce this is. There is no way he can let anyone into his head again, not with that amount of trust he needs to drift. They cut so many at the Pons stage at the Jaeger Academy for this reason; there is nothing to hide from your partner, nothing you can hide. It is raw vulnerability at its very best. The amount of trust you have in the person standing next to you, fighting next to you; people underestimate the amount you need to do that. In the drift, friends could grow apart, couples could split over disputes, hidden secrets could come out and relationships could be ruined. Not for him and Marco. Even though they might not have been the smartest or the strongest or the fastest, they’d made the cut, and they were fearsome in battle, meriting the respect of their fellow pilots. But now Marco is gone, and Jean can never go back.

“Kirstein!” The Marshall’s voice beckons. Jean grimaces slightly and lengthens his stride to catch up with the Marshall. Even for a one-armed man, he walks with all the swagger of a pilot still. Jean had never learned of his past; only that it had been gruesome—he slides his eyes over the swinging loose sleeve on Marshall Smith’s right side, and suppressed his questions.

Instead he focuses his attention on the person standing next to the Marshall, a young man of about eighteen or nineteen, whose blue-green eyes are remarkably bright in their hue, fixed on Jean with an unsettling intensity. Jean reflexively tightens his grip on his backpack, trying to expend the sudden burst of violent energy in his muscles—they’re shaking—he takes deep breaths to calm himself. He isn’t about to let some kid get on his nerves. _What would Marco do?_ Marco would never pick a fight so petty. Hell, the kid hadn’t even spoken yet. _Don’t judge people based on the feeling you get from them_. It’s an asshole-ish thing to do (but Jean is an asshole anyway, always was, always will be).

“Mr. Kirstein—this is Eren Jaeger.” Marshall Smith places his hand on Eren’s shoulder. “He’ll show you around. I would do so myself, but I have meetings to attend. You know, the usual.” A smile cracks his expression. “I will see you soon, Mr. Kirstein, at the candidate trials.”

“Candidate trials?”

“For your co-pilot, Mr. Kirstein.” The Marshall nods at Jean. “Good day, Ranger.”

Jean nods briefly to the Marshall’s retreating figure, and turns back to Eren Jaeger, who swipes his fingers briefly over the screen of his phone, before shoving it in his pocket of his baggy pants. He meets Jean’s eyes again with his bright blue-green ones, like the color of the sea. “You wanna see your Jaeger?” he asks, and without waiting for an answer, he turns on his heel and starts walking. Jean grits his teeth. That walk, he knew that walk; he used to have that walk, that ridiculous confidence and invulnerability— _I can fight the hurricane, I can carry the sky, I can win._ He spits on the concrete ground, in need of something to take out his bitterness on—cocky young dipshits showing him around? God forbid he had to deal with people like this again. He digs his nails into his palm, cursing himself for letting the Marshall talk him so easily into coming back.

“So, kid,” he says, trying not to let his disdain leak out in his voice, “Is your last name _actually_ Jaeger?”

Eren glares behind him. “Yes,” he says, straining his voice. “Yes, it is. My dad is Grisha Jaeger, the developer of the Jaeger program.”

Jean blinks. “Oh. Shit, I didn’t know—”

He really didn’t—Eren doesn’t look much like Grisha; he takes much more after his mother, Carla.  Jean had only seen Grisha and Carla once, when he and Marco were all dressed up  in suits and ties and military badges, paraded around in some kind of ceremony of recognition or something fancy or another (there had been speeches, including one given by Grisha, and medals given out and handshakes and all of that kind of thing, but it was all very fuzzy in his memory; he’d spent most of the occasion itching at his neck while trying not to cuss Marco out for chuckling at his discomfort). He can see bits of her in Eren now, the same dark brown hair (but Eren’s hair is shaggy and short, some supposedly trendy haircut) the same tanned olive complexion (but Eren’s skin is marked with scratches and smudges of dirt—did he even know what a shower was?), and the same youthful, handsome face (and in this, Jean can protest no difference; they both exude a vitality that is unparalleled by anyone else). But Grisha, there isn’t much of Grisha in Eren at all, except  in those eyes, those dramatic eyes, that determined, knowing expression—no, not just his eyes, in his whole presence; there is sense of intensity, languid power, like a crouching tiger hiding in the shadows, waiting to unleash its fury (it’s in the way he walks, the swagger of a confidence of a Ranger is present, but also the strength of something else—no, not just strength, something more than that, something but Jean cannot quite make out what it is).

“No one seems to,” Eren says resentfully, jamming his hands in his pockets with more force than needed. “Anyway. This is it. This is your Jaeger. Atlas Reaper.”

He stops at a railing overlooking one of the Jaeger bays. Jean slowly walks up next to him, drops his bags on the floor, his eyes widening as he takes in the Jaeger in its bay. “Wow,” he breathes. “Wow. _Wow._ ”

The last time he’d seen Atlas Reaper, he had been half unconscious, staring skywards, trying to focus his slippery mind but failing, retaining only vague images in his memory of falling snow, churning oceans, the faint screaming that echoed still in his head. It had been falling apart, Atlas, gears leaking out of metal hull, sparks falling out of its chest and arms, half-alive, gaping holes in the Conn-Pod and in its core. But now—god. So beautiful. So incredibly beautiful. _Marco, are you seeing this shit?_ Its armor gleamed, the plates of iron seamlessly soldered to each other, and the head of the Jaeger, its visor polished a golden yellow, shines brightly in the flickers of the flying sparks—

“She’s as good as new,” he murmurs.

“Not just,” Eren says quietly. “Forty-engine block per muscle strand, solid iron hull, no alloys, and a double nuclear energy core… She’s one of a kind.”

Jean looks over at the boy—Eren’s tanned face had softened, like a little boy looking up at the stars, mouth relaxed into a soft, fluid half-smile, unlike the hard line it had been before. The intensity lost its edge, and instead from him flowed true admiration and respect and—and—affection. Jean looks away, at his knuckles, but he can’t help himself sneaking another glance at Eren’s face, which positively luminous—he noticed the vitality before (how could he not, when he is Carla living again?) but this is more than that; he is shining like Atlas Reaper, like a flickering star. If he reaches out and touches, he’s sure that Eren’s skin would be warm, welcoming—

“Beautiful, huh?” Eren says, and Jean opens his mouth only to find that no words will form in his throat.

Eren breaks his gaze away from the Jaeger to look at Jean with those vividly intense blue-green eyes, pauses a moment, before turning around and starting to walk away.

“Come on,” he says. “I’ll show you to your quarters so you don’t have to lug that stupid backpack around.”

***

“So, are you in J-tech?” Jean asks, trying to alleviate the tension. Out of the good of his own heart, really. Eren irritates him in that way some people do with simply the way they are, without words or actions; but everyone is in the same boat. There’s no point creating useless petty conflict. That endangers your life in combat—he’s seen it happen, Jaegers getting torn apart after pilots have a disagreement, and it’s not something he wants to see happen ever again.

“J-tech? You’re assuming that just because my dad developed the Jaeger program?” Eren makes a face, and his eyebrows furrow together like little caterpillars wriggling towards each other across his forehead. “I’m not my dad. I haven’t even seen him in years. And I’m not in J-tech.”

His voice turns cold, and Jean takes the hint to back off, though he feels the prick of irritation on his neck. “Showing has-beens like me around can’t be your only job, though,” he says. “What do you do? Research?”

Eren sets his mouth in a thin line; his eyes narrow slightly like he’s concentrating very hard on something. “I want to be a pilot,” he says quietly. “I have to kill them all.”

Jean stops. “Kill them all? …The kaiju?”

“What the fuck else is there to kill?”

Jean stops walking. He looks up at the ceiling, closes his eyes; his face struggles not to break into a patronizing smile. “Oh my god. You’re shitting me, aren’t you? You’re shitting me. Please tell me you are fucking shitting me.”

Eren whirls around. “What the fuck is it?” he growls, his haunches raised.

Jean chokes back a snort. “A shit like you, so green behind the ears? Kill all the kaiju? You can’t _possibly_ expect to kill all the kaiju. You can’t possibly expect to kill one kaiju, not with that bullshit attitude. Do you _know_ how many people have died fighting those things?” Marco’s face flashes in his memory; he pushes it back down. “I’m not stupid. Fighting those things is not a picnic, even in the Jaeger. You’d have to be batshit crazy to want to fight them.”

“Then why the fuck are you here?” Eren snipes back. “You disappeared for five years, the famous Jean Kirstein, pilot of Atlas Reaper—you fought and you killed kaiju and—and then you disappeared until the Marshall dug you up crawling on the anti-kaiju wall in motherfucking Canada!Thousands of people die every kaiju attack, every kaiju blue spread, every famine, and you _resign as pilot_? The fuck did you run away for?”

“Because I actually an ounce of sense in my head!” Jean’s heavy jacket suddenly feels too hot, his ears bright red, tongue thirsting for blood. “In-land, that’s the safest place you can be! Out here, on shore, in the Jaeger, you can die. You can _lose your fucking life._ Did that ever occur to you, kid? _Did it?_ The last thing you might fucking see is a kaiju’s ugly-ass face, and then you’d be gone. Forever. The Jaegers aren’t invulnerable, you know—not like you apparently think you are, walking all around like you own the fucking place, like you think no one can touch you? Got some kind of death wish, do you—”

Eren strides right up to Jean, so close that their chests are centimeters apart. “My dad fucking _invented_ Jaegers. Don’t patronize me, you”—his eyes flick up and down, and when they meet Jean’s glower again, they are full of unrefined disgust—“ _coward._ ”

There are people gathered around them now, forming a wide ring around them, their eyes watching and waiting for a fight. Jean has tied his hands up tight into fists, trying to steady the shaking—but they tremble on their own, itching to punch this dipshit in front of him full on in the face, hopefully with enough force to crack bone. His skin prickles icy cold, but his core blazes like lava, he feels anger bubbling underneath, ready to erupt and burn the living hell out of this idiot. He forces himself to take deep breaths.

“Don’t. _Ever_. Call me that again,” he says, releasing the words out slowly and carefully; if he spills them carelessly, they would run amok and cause more havoc than he needs.

Eren simply tilts his head, raises his stupid eyebrows, parts his lips: “ _Try me,_ ” he whispers.

That does  it. _That does it._ Jean grabs the front of Eren’s shirt, slams him against the wall with as much force as he can muster, and slugs him with his right fist like he’s fighting a kaiju, leaving a blossoming red mark and a few dots of exposed raw flesh. A hiss of pain leaks out between Eren’s clenched teeth, but instead of becoming more angry, Eren grins (much to Jean’s chagrin), and twists his fists into the collar of Jean’s heavy jacket. “ _Let’s go, motherfucker_ ,” he says in a breathy voice, and throws Jean down on the floor, using the split second of recoil to land on top of him, and raises an arm to throw a punch.

Jean sees the move coming before he can even think in coherent words. He grabs Eren’s fist as it goes down, using its momentum to throw his face into the ground, and shoves Eren’s uncomfortable weight off his body, jumping back into a standing position. “You have to try more than that, kid,” he snarls. “I am, after all, a Jaeger pilot.”

Eren stands up unsteadily, wipes the blood dripping from his nose, and grins again, the look in his eyes delirious. This time, when he runs at Jean, he moves so fast Jean loses track of his movements; a few blows to his shins, stomach, and face and he’s on the ground again, a sweaty, dirty hand on his face (he tries not to gag), another pressing at his throat, and Eren’s voice in his ear whispering, “ _How do you like that, Jaeger pilot?_ ” all mocking and detestable, and Jean is about to knee the fucker hard between the legs when a dry, low voice starts them both.

“What’s going on here?”

The uncomfortable pressure on his face and throat lifts, and the people watching the fight scatter to wherever they were supposed to go. Eren is standing, all professional again, trying to breathe slowly (trying to cover up the fact that he was breathing hard; it is obvious that he felt adrenaline fire up his fists while they were fighting and Jean will kick and scream before he admits it to anyone but he felt it too, that surge of hot-blooded energy). Jean straightens up (blood rushes to his head, and he almost feels dizzy, he hasn’t been in a proper fight in so long, _so incredibly long,_ not since Marco died, not since he had to punch the kaiju through its chest in order to get it to drown in the sea, not since he crawled all the way back to the shores of Alaska in a Jaeger that was falling apart), and clasps his hands behind his back, meeting Captain Levi’s thin-eyed gaze and crossed arms.

“Sir,” Eren says, “Mr. Kirstein started it, if you will—”

“With all due respect sir,” Jean declares, raising his voice a little louder than Eren’s, “I was provoked into it—”

“I don’t give a shit who started it,” Levi says in his perpetually lazy tone, “but I do give a shit that the both of you grow up and start acting like the Rangers you both are. Even if”—his eyes shift to Eren—“you haven’t actually been in one yet.”

Eren’s jaw tightens, as do his fists.

“Or even if,” Levi continues, his eyes settling on Jean, “you haven’t been in one for five years.”

Shame burns the tips of Jean’s ears, and he resists the urge to swear irritably. There had been a rumor going around back in the day, something like Levi had been in a gang before joining the PPDC and becoming a Jaeger pilot. If Jean didn’t believe it then, he believes it now. _The man knows how to hit it where it hurts._

“Do you know the consequence of your actions? What if the brass was here? What the fuck would they think? Eren—you’re green behind the ears still and painfully bratty as hell, but surely you know better. And Jean—for fuck’s sake, Jean, on your first fucking day?  You are embarrassing me, you are embarrassing the Marshall, and you are embarrassing this entire fucking Shatterdome by behaving like this. This had better not happen again.” Levi’s characteristic expression of apathy had twisted into disgust and anger. “Do you understand?”

Eren and Jean give a curt nod.

But the captain isn’t satisfied. Levi closes his eyes and leans in, turning his head to the side, putting a hand to his ear. Jean and Eren glance each other briefly, and then grind out the words in unison: _“Yes, sir._ ”

The captain leans back, satisfied. “Good. Now get your disgusting— _dirty_ —selves to the infirmary and get cleaned up. I’ll show you to your quarters,” he adds to Jean. “Mr. Jaeger here can go to the infirmary by himself and think about how much of a shit he was today.”

Eren curls his lip in contempt, but turns away and stalks off to the infirmary. Jean looks back at his shoulder one more time, wishing all the worst luck and misery to his newfound enemy, then follows Levi into his room.

***

The nurse sticks bandages on his face, like a scarlet letter on his jaw to wear proudly around the Shatterdome. He didn’t expected to be received well in the first place; after all, like Eren said, he had been crawling on the wall when the Marshal dug him out of anonymity, but his brawl with Eren makes him more noticeable— _him, that’s the guy who picked a fight with Dr. Jaeger’s kid—oh yeah I know him, he disappeared for five years after Aberrant—what did he do?—Jaeger’s kid says he was in construction, out of all things—Jesus Christ_. Their looks crawl on his skin uncomfortably; their silence when he walks into the cafeteria spells _shame on you,_ their judgment reveals borderline contempt.

He looks around. All of the seats are pretty much taken. _Great_ , the brat already made him look like an ungrateful shit from day one. His hard-earned reputation, his kaiju kill count, his glory days, gone in a five-minute brawl, oh how he despises that little shit— _I hope you never fucking step foot in a Jaeger in your entire life, ever. After I’m done killing kaiju I’m going to pound your face in—_

“Jean? That you?”

Who was that? He blinks rapidly, looking over his shoulder towards where the voice yells out at him. “Reiner?”

And before he can blink again, strong arms squeeze him tightly, pinning his arms to his side, and Jean struggles to breathe, trying not to laugh. “Jesus— _Christ_ —”

“Reiner, he can’t breathe!” another deep voice, less booming, chastises Reiner, and the strong arms loosen their group, and the owner of the arms leans back and grins broadly, while behind him his taller co-pilot sweats worriedly (how very typical of him).

“Are you okay?” says the taller one, his greenish eyes concerned. Jean smiles. They haven’t changed a bit since their young pilot days, except perhaps that the other two have logged more hours in Jaeger-kaiju combat than he has, but they were always good at what they did, even back at the Academy. Reiner is literally a tank, built heavily, with broad chest and broad shoulders and broad voice, while Bertholdt is simply tall and imposing—though the expression on his face is perpetual anxiety, so Jean should not say ‘imposing’ for Bertholdt is more like a worried tree.

“I’m fine,” Jean says to them. “It’s good to see you two again, even if you tried to suffocate me to death.” (Reiner shrugs unapologetically, still grinning.) “Kill any kaiju while I was out?”

“Hell yeah!” says Reiner, laughing. “Here, come on, sit at our table.”

“Oh, I couldn’t—”

“Nonsense, there’s plenty of room; come on.” Reiner puts his arm around Jean’s shoulders and leads him to a table. “Shove over, guys, make room for the return of the hero—and make sure to pass the corned beef. Gotta maintain these babies.” He kisses the bicep of his free arm, and Bertholdt looks physically pained, like he’s trying desperately not to slap a palm to his face. Jean laughs—he’s missed this, horsing around with Reiner and Bertholdt. Reiner is such a character that any time with him at the table is guaranteed to have them split their sides laughing by the end of lunch hour. If only their fellow pilots who graduated in their class were still alive—Nack and Milius, Franz and Hannah, everyone—it really would have felt just like old times again. But everyone had died; they were really the only three left who still remembered each other in Academy days.

“So,” Reiner says through a mouthful of potatoes, “I heard you got in a fight with the Jaeger kid.”

Jean grimaces. Not this again. He loves Reiner and Bertholdt like brothers but if he has to hear about how he went out of face on the first day _one more time_ he might as well just take the first plane at back to Alaska and save himself any more embarrassment. “I did,” he admits reluctantly. “Got called out by Levi too.”

Bertholdt and Reiner cringe at the same time; the gesture is so funny Jean almost laughs. Evidently they’d drifted so much together that they’d started to move together at the same time, even without the Pons connection. It stirs up some tightness in his chest; if Marco was still around they would probably do this too. No, they probably did it when he was still alive. _Stop, stop, stop thinking about Marco._

“That’s rough, buddy,” Reiner says, stabbing at the corned beef. “I can see why you’d punch Jaeger though. Kid’s a brat. Right pain in the ass, if you ask me.”

“I don’t think he’s that bad,” says Bertholdt quietly (well, Bertholdt said everything quietly), but Reiner shakes his head.

“Bertholdt, I love you, and I respect all of your opinions, but really, come on. Who got that ridiculous idea that he had to kill all the kaiju into his head? Fucking impossible.”

“I told him that!” Jean bursts out, with relief. “I told him that, and he fucking insulted me.”

“Of course he did, it’s the only way he can feel better about himself.” Reiner waves his fork in the air. “The kid’s never even been on a Pons connection with anyone, let alone suited up and stepped foot inside any kind of Conn-Pod. They tried to match him with someone at the Academy and—well—well, okay, it kind of worked. But he got cut. ‘Kind of’ doesn’t cut it when you’re going to fight kaiju.”

“Who did he drift with?” Jean ventures, curious to know who could possibly handle the shithead long enough to actually try and initiate a neural handshake.

“Mikasa Ackerman.” Reiner shoves food into his mouth.

“Sorry, who?”

Reiner moves his head, like he’s trying to look past Jean, and then points with his fork. “Her.”

“Her” is a _gorgeous_ young woman, about the same age as Eren (but she looks much older, much more mature and much more composed), crossing the cafeteria with all the grace and elegance of a queen, the physicality of an Olympic athlete, and the short glossy black hair of a doll that hugs her pale face—and what an exquisite face it is, porcelain with clearly defined cheekbones, a mouth that looks it would taste sweet, and gray eyes that burn with an intensity that he’s seen before— _on Eren_ , Jean remembers with a grimace, but he can see how they would be paired up for Pons testing. That concentration of will is impossible to fake. Maybe in his Academy days he would be more attracted to her, try to get her number or something dumb like that, but now he can tell that she’s out of his league, and most definitely not interested in a has-been of a pilot like him. “She’s pretty hot,” he mutters.

“I guess, if you’re into that kind of thing,” Reiner says dismissively (of course. Jean smiles to himself. He has Bertholdt, what is the need for anyone else?). “But Ackerman’s pretty much the best in her class. A prodigy, you know? I heard,” he adds, leaning in and dropping his voice to a low murmur, “that her simulator score is fifty-one drops and fifty-one kills.”

Jean blinks. “That’s amazing. Why didn’t they get paired up?”

“I don’t know. Bert, do you know?”

Bertholdt touched his fingers to his lips, thinking. “I remember hearing something about how she carried a lot more of the neural load than she was supposed to. So when they stopped it, she looked like all of the early pilots back before they developed the two-pilot system—you know, bloodshot eyes, bloody nose, about to pass out, everything.”

“You can _do_ that?” Jean almost drops his fork. “I didn’t even know that was possible.”

“Well, that’s what happened with them,” says Bertholdt. “And apparently they weren’t compatible with anyone else at the Academy either, so Mikasa learned how to bring nothing into the drift.”

“Bring nothing into the drift? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Not everyone can do it, but it would be a waste for the best pilot after Captain Levi in years to have all that talent and not be able to use it. I’m not entirely sure how it works, honestly, but you have to leave behind your sense of self and your attachments to the world almost completely to be able to drift with anyone. A lot of the Zen stuff. They tried to teach Eren too but he couldn’t do it.”

“The fuck’s he doing here then? Some kind of Ranger he’s supposed to be. Why didn’t they match them up after they taught Mikasa how to do the—” Jean waves his hand. “The nothing into the drift thing.”

Reiner and Bertholdt exchange glances. “Well—” Reiner starts.

“Um—” Bertholdt mumbles.

They are suddenly very interested in the corn huddling on their plates, Bertholdt trying to scoop up as much as he could on his fork while Reiner is content stabbing them all individually like a kebab.

It dawns on Jean. “It’s… for me. They think he’s drift-compatible with me.”

They both make an apologetic face, and Reiner busies himself by stuffing himself with food, while Bertholdt plays with the dog tags around his neck.

 _Jesus fucking Christ_. Jean imagines the pieces of potatoes on his plate as Eren’s face and assaults them viciously with his silverware. Drift compatible with that son of a bitch? Completely impossible. No. It couldn’t happen— _wouldn’t_ happen. No, no, what he needs is Marco alive again, Marco smiling again, Marco to fill the Marco-sized hole in his head; warm laughter and a splash of freckles and a mouth that tastes like cookies and _Marco_. He’s not about to open up to Eren and _drift_ with the piece of shit. The kid practically already knows his life story already, and god forbid Jean does not want to see Eren’s past, because he doesn’t care—it’s probably not pleasant anyway. God knows Jean’s had enough unpleasantness in his life already.

Reiner and Bertholdt glance at each other again, and Reiner sighs. “There aren’t a lot of pilots left, and honestly, the pair of them are good fighters. I’ve seen them in the Kwoon, training with each other. They’re pretty deadly, although she’s definitely miles better than he is.”

Jean rubs the still-throbbing bruise on his face with a scowl. “The kid certainly knows how to throw a punch.”

Reiner laughs. “Oh Jean. I’ve missed you piloting with us. I’m sorry to hear about Marco,” he adds with a solemn face.

“I am sorry as well.” Bertholdt bows his head respectfully.

Jean puts down his fork, a little stunned but mostly grateful. “Thank you.”

Reiner and Bertholdt nod politely. “Of course,” Reiner says. “Marco was a great pilot and a good man.”

They dig their forks into their food again at the same time, moving it to their mouths in unison. Jean watches them fondly—their intimacy is not something Jean is not familiar with, but five years after Jean left the PPDC, they are like one being entirely, two halves of the same person, Reiner just happening to be the mouthpiece. Their small gestures (stolen glances when they think no one is looking, slight bumps of the shoulder to comfort the other, casual brushing of fingers even across the table) make Jean smile, and oh, if  Marco was here— _but he’s not. Stop thinking about him._

“So,” Reiner says through a mouthful of corn. “Don’t you have candidate trials tomorrow morning?”

Jean grimaces at the prospect of having to get up early and fight complete strangers. Even back in the day, deployments at two in the morning were a struggle. “Yeah, I’m… not really looking forward to that.”

“Why not?” Reiner chews loudly. “Surely you’re itching to get back out there and fight after being AWOL for five years? I know I’d be.”

 _Not everyone is like you, Reiner._ Jean doesn’t know if he can go out there and kill kaiju again—no, he doesn’t know if he can let anyone into his head again. He didn’t even like fighting kaiju to begin with, if he is perfectly honest with himself, and he is, he always is. He doesn’t lie to himself, and he doesn’t try to, not like that dipshit Eren fucking Jaeger, with all of that bravado and bullshit. _Walk the walk, kid._

Eren Jaeger’s fucked up attitude aside, Jean just wants to be safe again. Sitting on the beams in the wall and soldering them together is safer than fighting kaiju. That is solitude, and he is far safer alone than any other way he can think of. Just keep running. Maybe you can outrun the pain if you’re fast enough. Running feels good, all that exertion pumping legs and all that tension melting away; there is just feet hitting the ground, lungs squeezing breath, air rushing past your arms and legs, that satisfaction of leaving everything behind, far away where the eye cannot see. He ran for five years, what’s not a little more?

_No one can run from the kaiju._

Jean shrugs and keeps eating. Reiner and Bertholdt move on.

_You cannot outrun them._

_***_

He’s taped the pictures he carried around in his bag to the wall opposite to his bunk, and the morning of the candidate trials, after he’s taken a shower, he sits down and looks at them all of again. They are well-looked; he has perused them many times in the last five years, always absorbing every detail with his eyes and keeping it near to his consciousness.

There are many: one of them shows Reiner and Bertholdt and Marco and him laughing with all of their arms draped on each other, another shows Marco trying to carry Reiner piggy-back style but failing miserably (Reiner’s ass sags terribly, and Marco’s face is laughing too hard to put his arms to actual use of bearing Reiner’s weight). One on the far left shows all the pilots at the Anchorage Shatterdome suited up and doing the conga; right beneath they are still in drivesuits and are lined up giving thumbs up, grinning like they’re standing on top of the world (and they kind of were, being so far up north). A cluster on the far right show some of his former comrades who had died in combat: Nack and Milius throwing mock gang signs, Franz and Hannah waving enthusiastically, Mina and Thomas striking silly poses while wearing sunglasses and hula skirts.

And the middle one (Jean stands up and reaches his fingers to brush this one), Jean smiles back at himself, his arm thrown over Marco, who’s laughing—a slice of a second, frozen forever on the glossy paper. Real-life Jean sighs. “I guess I’m going to go find my new co-pilot today, huh?” He steps back a little, feeling silly for talking to a photo, and slips a jacket on over his tank. “Wish me luck, Marco.”

He brushes his fingers once more over the photo in the middle.

A knock at the door asks for his attention, and so he crosses the room and opens the door to find a short boy (possibly man, his blue eyes look much older and sharper than his babyish face) at the door.

“Good morning,” the boy at the door says, fumbling with his clipboards to manage an extended hand towards Jean. “I’m Armin Arlelt, and I’ll be showing you to the Kwoon for your candidate trials.”

Jean shakes his hand tentatively. They set off at a brisk pace (everyone here walks quickly, like the kaiju are about to attack any second—then again, they probably are) and Jean tries conversation with him, hoping it won’t go as terribly as the last time he tried to initiate conversation with someone who was showing him around.

“So, are you in J-tech?” he asks.

“Yup,” Armin says easily. “I don’t usually do the LOCCENT stuff, but I help out and maintain equipment and stuff like that. And, um”—he pushes some of his blond hair behind his ear—“I help with pairing up co-pilots.”

Jean blinks. “Oh. Then—did you—?”

“Uh-huh.” Armin smiles. “I studied your fighting style and your personality and everything, and handpicked every single candidate.”

Wow. Everyone here seems to know Jean better than Jean himself. Irritation pricks him like thorns in his side, and he grimaces, rubbing his eyes as an afterthought, trying to pass off his bad mood as fatigue. Or maybe he is just tired and cranky because of it. Or maybe it’s the ridiculous jetlag; whose wonderful idea was it to hold his candidate trials right after he traveled ten hours by plane from Alaska to Hong Kong? Absolutely terrible. He is complaining to the Marshall when this is over.

Wait, wait—if Armin was the one who picked out the candidates—

“Wait.”

Jean stops walking, and Armin stops once he realizes Jean isn’t by his side.

“What is it, Jean?”

“You’re the one who—you’re the one who thinks I’m drift-compatible with Eren Jaeger?”

Armin scratches his head. “Um. Yes?”

Jean takes a deep breath. “What compelled you to think that we were drift-compatible?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Me and Jaeger, we’re—we are complete opposites. The kid—Jaeger—his head’s just so _far up his ass_ and me—I don’t—I’m not that kind of person, I’m not into that bullshit. There’s no way we’re fucking drift-compatible.”

“Actually,” Armin says, crossing his arms over his clipboard. “I think that now, having met both of you in real life, I think you are very drift-compatible.”

Jean crosses his arms. “Really.”

“Really.” Armin meets his eyes defiantly. “Both of you—you have that same nasty look in your eye.”

Nasty look in his eye? Yeah, right. He doesn’t have huge goo-goo eyes, or a baby-face like Eren does. What a ridiculous idea. To judge compatibility based on a look in someone’s eye? What about the actual compatibility part? The actually getting along and being able to work together without fighting and arguing and yelling part? This Armin kid is probably the shittiest person to work in J-tech in the history of ever. He turns away. “Let’s just keep moving.”

The rest of the walk continues in silence.

“Here we are,” Armin says, and they enter a wide, empty space with a great portion covered with mats on the floor. There are people milling around already in various positions of warm-up, dressed in various forms of athletic clothes. Jean sighs. He doesn’t want to have to go through this. He didn’t have to do it at the Academy, since he enlisted with Marco and they were (thankfully) drift-compatible  from the get-go, but they were made to watch all the people who enlisted by themselves rotate sparring partners until they were paired up with a potential partner. It looked and was painful—even if they used _bo_ staffs to prevent actual contact, some people got too rough with the sparring, and there was no shortage of bodies hitting mats during the match-up stage. Jean isn’t fond of early-morning workouts, let alone early-morning anything except lie-ins. Lunch is only seven hours away— _only seven hours._ His stomach twists; it will surely not last that long.

He shrugs off his jacket and his tough standard-issue combat boots, gently pulling at his muscles to loosen them up. Cold air pumps through the vents, slowly snapping the weariness around his eyes away, pumping some vigor into his arms and legs. It feels good now, but in twenty minutes it will feel like Alaska inside the Kwoon. _The air conditioning here is ridiculous._

“Good morning, Ranger,” the Marshall’s voice says behind him, and Jean whips around in mild shock.

“Sir!” he says, but the Marshall holds up his hand.

“At ease, Mr. Kirstein. I assume you are ready to commence?”

“Yes, I am, sir.”

“Good. Take a _bo_ staff.” Armin hands him one, and Jean takes it with a slight sigh, feels the weight, gages the balance. _Here we go, I guess._

His first opponent is probably about twenty years old, but his face is so wrinkly and gross that he actually looks closer to forty than twenty. His reflexes are slow— _how did he survive past the Academy?—_ and Jean manages to flip him onto the ground easily and point a _bo_ staff at him in seconds. “Match,” he says, and the man on the ground gets up and stands back in the crowd with all the other candidates.

The next opponent is much the same, and the next, and the next. Jean finds his mind wandering some while he is taking them down easily, whipping his _bo_ staff and slamming them down to the ground—maybe there would be chicken for lunch today, oh chicken—he’s seen it on people’s trays so he knows they _must_ serve it, but when he went to get it yesterday there was none. He hasn’t had chicken in years—they didn’t have them in Alaska; there hadn’t been the resources to grow too many animals, so meat was scarce, reserved only for the rich and powerful who lived inland. Absolutely terrible.

“Next!” Marshall Smith’s voice booms across the space and Jean leans slightly on his _bo_ staff, surveying the crowd to see who will come out next. It isn’t who he’s expecting, but there’s no mistaking who it is. No one else has that intense presence like that of a crouching tiger, those dark and vivid eyes, that obnoxious and pretentious smirk. _Asshole._

“Well, well, well, look what the cat dragged in,” Jean sneers at his opponent, who cocks an eyebrow confidently.

“Round two, Jaeger pilot.” Eren cracks his knuckles and picks up a staff. “Let’s go.”

He whirls his _bo_ staff  elegantly and grasps it firmly at waist height with both hands, like he is holding a katana sword at _gogyo no seigan no kamae_ , relaxed and ready, waiting for Jean to make a move. Jean curls his lip. Eren’s confidence _pisses him off_ , but this time, it is a controlled kind of pissed-off, a focused anger, an immense preparation for great concentration. The pounding in his chest sounds in his ears, his arms feel warm and loose even in the coldness of the monster air conditioning inside the Kwoon, and the fatigue that had drained the energy out of his muscles melts away. He’s ready.

He positions himself lightly on his feet, sliding forward on the mat while sweeping the staff in front of him, stopping at the ready position. _Bring it on, motherfucker._

They study each other for several seconds, before Eren moves, fast as a snake, but Jean manages to dodge the sweeping of Eren’s staff and sweeps his own staff at Eren’s legs, knocking him to the ground. Before he can move to point his staff at Eren’s throat to mark a win, Eren slaps the ground and rolls forward back into a standing position, rushing at Jean with a downward striking motion. Jean blocks, and lunges again, but Eren parries again, and then it is Jean’s turn to parry, and then Eren’s, and then Jean’s.

The fight continues sinuously, seamlessly, and the more they move the more coordinated they seem with each other, like they are dancing, the choreography already etched into their muscles and minds, and Jean’s thoughts of lunch slip away as he ducks and dives and swings and sweeps and watches Eren do the same—his blows grow stronger, as do Eren’s, and his feet grow faster, as do Eren’s. They are fluid—not two people fighting, but the same being flowing with itself. Time falls by the wayside; their fight is eternity—he does not even feel resentment towards Eren in this moment. He does not feel anything but the battle; there is only the exertion of muscle and the bursts of energy and the whirling of _bo_ staffs and  the exhale of breath.

At some point, after years or months or weeks or probably minutes, Jean manages to take a leap and pin Eren down to the ground with his legs, and points a bo staff at his throat.  Both of their chests are heaving, but Jean’s veins still flow with something hot and fierce, and the look in Eren’s eyes assures that he feels the same. They could have fought forever, if given the time and energy. Jean can definitely go another round—his arms ache vaguely but it is a good ache, a job well done ache, a satisfied ache, and Eren’s eyes burn with determination. _More,_ he craves more of the fighting, and Jean craves it, too.

“Well.” The Marshall’s voice drop them back into reality. “It looks like we have found you a co-pilot, Mr. Kirstein.”

Jean lets up his staff and helps Eren up, before realizing the outcome of their fight. “Wait. Wait, what?”

Marshall Smith’s eyes gaze at the pair steadily. “It means Mr. Jaeger here will be your co-pilot.”

 _What?_ Eren? His fucking _copilot?_ Fuck. _Fuck._ Jesus fucking Christ. Oh no. No, no, no, this is _not_ what he signed up for , no, no, not this piece of shit. This is the brat who dared call him coward, the brat who pissed him off without even uttering a word, the brat who swaggered around because _I’m-Mr.-my-dad-invented-Jaegers—_ fuck him, _fuck_ him. Painfully up the ass, if possible. There is no way he is _actually_ drift compatible with this piece of shit—he was drift-compatible with Marco and how fucking different could they be? Marco was literally the kindest human being to walk the earth, and Eren—Eren is probably the most obnoxious and irritating human being, and possibly the one of the stupidest. Definitely one of the stupidest.

“With all due respect, sir,” Jean says, stepping forward, trying not to exhale a chuckle of disbelief. “I think there’s been a mistake. There’s surely no way I’m drift-compatible with Eren Jaeger—”

“I think the same, sir,” Eren cuts in, and Jean grips his _bo_ staff a little tighter, _what an  ungrateful  piece of shit, interrupting me while I’m talking to the Marshall—_

“I don’t think there’s been a mistake at all,” says the Marshall evenly. “You are to report to the simulators for a trial drift at 0900 hours.”

“But—” Jean protests.

“No buts,” the Marshall says severely. “Make sure neither of you are tardy.”

He turns on his heel and walks out, his loose right sleeve swinging and Jean’s eyes boring into his back with frustration. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I thought I put a note on here earlier but okay) OVERUSED TROPE IS OVERUSED but uuuughh I love my baes and I love Pacific Rim and then I started writing and then suddenly there were eight thousand words oh no um I'm sorry thank you for reading really thank you so much REALLY


	2. every last one

Eren beats him to the Drivesuit Room.

It pisses Jean off, just like everything Eren does, but Jean wanted this upper hand, this stake to claim that he was first to the Drivesuit Room and now he can’t get it. _He’s_ the older and more experienced pilot, he should be the one setting the example for everything, like not being tardy to suiting up and to simulation (he’s young for a pilot, sure, only twenty-six years old, but he’d had a good three years of service before leaving the PPDC the first time, and the amount he learned during those three years was invaluable). Eren looks smug as shit, standing there with his arms by his side, as technicians whiz around him tightening the pieces of body armor with mechanical screwdrivers. He looks over his shoulder as Jean walks in.

“Hello, Jaeger pilot,” he says, and though Jean doesn’t think it’s meant to be mocking or demeaning, it still sounds that way, the little sing-songy inflection of his voice taunts him and irritates him.

“Don’t call me that,” Jean grumbles, stepping into place beside Eren, and putting on the circuitry suit. “It makes me feel old.”

“There’s only a five-year age difference between us,” Eren remarks, holding his arm out so the technician can fit the armor around his bicep. “You’re not that old.”

Jean nearly chokes. “You’re _twenty-one?_ ”

“Yeah, what of it?”

 Jesus Christ, the kid has a baby face but he didn’t know that it would make him look a full three years younger. He doesn’t suppose that there is too much difference between an eighteen-year-old and a twenty-one-year-old physically, but still—the youthful exuberance he’d inherited from Carla did wonders, apparently.  Jean tries to get his breath back. “Sorry. Nothing.”

Eren smirks in that impossibly infuriating way, and Jean stares straight ahead, trying to ignore those ridiculously vivid blue-green eyes. If he’s older, he might as well make something of it.

“Remember, stay in the drift,” he tells Eren. “Let the memories flow, don’t latch on and chase the RABIT.”

“Random Access Brain Impulse Triggers,” Eren says. “I know, I know. Don’t worry about me. I’ve drifted before.”

“Not successfully,” Jean says, and Eren cringes slightly.

“Well—I know what I’m supposed to do,” he says a bit forcefully. “That one time, that was all Mikasa’s fault. She took too much of the neural load and—well I couldn’t do anything basically.”

His voice takes a turn for the bitter, and Jean looks over to find him glaring at the air in front of him, shaking slightly. The technicians have stopped buzzing around him, looking worried—if he shakes too much they can’t properly adjust the armor so it fits him. He has to calm down.

 “Um—hey—” Jean tries. “Hey, it’s okay…”

Eren closes his eyes, inhales deeply. “Sorry. I know. I shouldn’t bring that level of emotion into the drift.”

It is unexpected. Eren is the kind of person who would let his emotions get a hold of him, who would give into his impulses and see the world in black-and-white, a loose cannon if you will. The emotion in his eyes is raw and tempered by nothing, no chains, no binds, no nothing. It flows without his command, acts like it has a mind of its own. But just now. Eren, he—he reined it in. He reminded himself of his duty as a soldier and as a new co-pilot, and he reined it in. Jean looks away. Eren is a loose cannon, but not in that way; he is a loose cannon because he is unexpected, he acts differently than what you would think—Jean doesn’t know if this is an asset or a hindrance to him and to their new partnership.

Instead, he asks Eren a question.

“Why are you telling me this?”

Eren shrugs. “Well, we’re co-pilots now, aren’t we? We have to trust each other. Might as well start now. It’s not like the drift creates trust.”

Clearly he understands the drift better than most people at the Academy, at least in Jean’s day. He understands what is required of the drift. What people need, what kind of relationship and trust you need between pilots to drift successfully. He understands so well for someone who has never been in a proper holding neural handshake. Did his dad teach this to him? Did he learn from growing up around the mind behind the Jaegers? Did he watch Jaeger team after Jaeger team fall apart due to mistrust and embarrassment and secrets, like Jean did? It seems that first impressions are not reliable, not in the case of Eren Jaeger, who has vowed to kill all the kaiju, but also understands the requirements of a ranger, of a pilot, of courage and cooperation and trust. He is more than just an idiot who barrels into situations, blindly relying on his idealistic and unrealistic mantras—he is probably a better soldier than Jean himself. Which is irritating, because Jean is older than he is. Jean should be the better soldier. Jean’s seen combat. Eren hasn’t. What the fuck.

The technician pats Jean's shoulder. “You’re good to go.”

“Thanks.” Jean tucks his helmet under his arm and looks over at Eren. “Ready?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” Eren grins.

Armin appears again (his smile is a touch smug, and Jean grimaces and brushes it off; he’s not ready to admit Armin is right) and takes them into the simulator. “Good luck,” he says, sealing the pod. Jean exchanges glances with Eren.

“So which side do you want to take?” asks Eren.

“Uh—” Jean swallows uncomfortably. He hadn’t been asked that question in so long. He hadn’t been suited up and dumped inside a Conn-Pod of any kind for so long. “Well, um, with Marco I took the right side usually...”

“I’ll take left then.” Eren moves to the left harness and fits his back onto the metal fastenings. Jean hurries to do the same on the other harness. _Can't let this dipshit get ahead of me._

“Good morning, guys,” a voice crackles over the radio. Jean widens his eyes. He knows that voice. That voice has guided him through kaiju kills and stormy drops and wading through churning oceans and the day Atlas was ripped in half.

“Moblit!” Jean exclaims without thinking, and Moblit laughs nervously.

“Good to see you again, Jean,” he says. “Today we’re just going to do a trial drift, and if that’s successful you’ll take a walk around the simulator range, get used to moving inside a Jaeger, etcetera. Sound good?”

“Sounds great,” Eren replies enthusiastically. How naïve he is, practically bouncing out of his harness to get started. It kind of reminds Jean of Mar—

 _School your thoughts,_ Jean reprimands himself. Now is not the time to let grief over Marco run amok in his memory. It’s been five years. Move on. Stay in the drift, stay in the present—you have a new partner now, a new co-pilot, you can trust him. _Can you?_ Don’t doubt him, Jean. The brat made it to the Pons stage after being cut, after all. He is more than capable. That energy, that vitality, all it needs is to be focused, and you can mentor him, you can help him, it can be a good partnership, Marco would want you to be happy, that’s all he’d want…

“ _Initiating neural handshake in fifteen… fourteen… thirteen…_ ”

“Remember,” Jean warns him again. “Stay in the drift, the drift is Silence. Don’t latch on to any memories, just let them flow past you, like you’re looking at a river watching them go by. Just stay in the now.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” but Eren obliges with an inhale and a silence.

“All right,” Jean says, and closes his eyes, relaxes his mind, lets the emotions and images flow.

 _“Neural interface drift, initiating…_ ”

Fierce determination blows in his face first, cold and full of spirit, like immersing himself in a pool of cold water on a summer day, and then he is running around the city, dragging his mother by hand, there is laughing and sweet candy,  the simple pleasures of childhood—he isn’t sure if it’s his or Eren’s, but the fierce happiness he feels, it could be anyone’s—

—Marco’s face, smiling back at him, offering a seat on the bus and at lunch and speaking kindly to him, when he doesn’t know anyone at this new school and he is shy but he will never admit it, and he goes to Marco’s house often to play video games and eat pizza and play basketball in the driveway because Marco is his only friend; he’s too irritable and snappy to make friends with other people, but Marco is kind and friendly and who else would he need except for Marco—

—And then suddenly the first kaiju attack, _shh, just come with me, you’ll be safe, you’ll be safe, don’t stay in that alley any longer, just come with me, you’ll be fine, I’m here,_ and he wraps the little girl in a red scarf, covering her black hair, making sure she’s warm, enveloping her small body in his arms, running from the rubble and from the roar of the kaiju; there are tears pouring out of her eyes but she does not speak or sob, _I have to protect her—_

—And Marco stumbling after him while they’re trying to run from the raining rubble of the kaiju’s path of destruction, Marco falling to the ground, and he turns back, _I can’t let him die,_ narrowly dodging flying blocks of cement, carrying Marco in his arms, vowing to do something somehow, something, _something_ , but what, but what, and Marco says _we’ll become pilots_ , and they become pilots, and all this time his heart aches with something proper, if he ever lost Marco it would ache so much it would break and he takes Marco’s face in his hands and touches it with his lips, _I have to protect him_ —

—And now Mikasa is the one consoling him, and Carla’s face broken and bleeding, her arms unmoving, her legs hidden under rubble and he is screaming like nobody can hear him, trying to move the impossibly huge stone breaking her back, _I have to save you, you’ll be fine_ and behind him Mikasa screams _You can’t save her_ and he strains his arms they contract in agony and he screams at the kaiju at the sky at the rock crushing his mom _she’s not dead I have to save her we’ll be fine there has to be a way—_

—And they are swinging their arms, but their plasma cannons are empty, and he is screaming, because it is unbearable, the pain is unbearable, and Marco is yelling at him, _Jean, Jean we have to_ and then he is gone, flying away into the sea and he screams again like nobody can hear him and his head feels like it is being crushed under an immense pressure he screams make it stop make it stop _Bring him back_ he can’t bear it anymore his muscles are screaming the only noise he can hear is screaming and he punches desperately in front of him _Make it stop—_

Jean gasps, opens his eyes, he is back in the Conn-Pod, but the rush of memories, so turbulent, a white-water raft, and then an immense focused calm, a silent flat plane of water, but with great energy ready to burst, _what a sensation_. He stumbles a little bit in the harness, and next to him Eren does the same.

“ _Right hemisphere, calibrating… Left hemisphere, calibrating…”_

And they move in unison—no, there is no “they,” there is just “him,” there is no line separating Eren from Jean, they are _one_. And he puts his arms up in a boxing guard position, giant mechanical hands balled up in fists.

“Neural connection strong and holding,” Moblit’s voice crackles over the radio gladly. “Can you see the simulation?”

The screen in front of them flickers to a familiar range, snow and ice and rugged rock _._ Jean squints his eyes; it looks familiar, like he’s seen it before. _Concentrate, Jean. Drift. Eren. Simulator. Concentrate._

“Yes, we can see it,” Eren says to Moblit. “What do we do?”

“Just start walking.”

Eren exhales sharply, grinning. “Walking.”

“Yes. Walking. It’s very basic,” Jean says, and Eren laughs.

“Shut up, Jaeger pilot,” but they start moving, and exhilaration floods Jean’s limbs. It is all going so smoothly, the pseudo-Jaeger is responding easily to their body, and Moblit is continuously giving them such good feedback. He doesn’t miss being in a Jaeger, that sense of empowerment, the hope and endorphins surging through his system—he has to be careful, of course, they both have to be careful because Jaegers aren’t invulnerable, but still, that feeling, what a feeling. He isn’t even in a proper Jaeger, but it feels like it, the weight feels like it, and beside him Eren laughs, because Jean feels like laughing too, and the thought originates not from either one, but from them together. What a good feeling it is. What a good feeling.

The simulator moves around an icy cliff, and they can see a little bit of the ocean, rough and choppy, and Jean widens his eyes—

_Jean, we have to—!_

Jean winces, the screaming, _not the screaming!_ Eren flinches next to him.

“Jean, Eren, you’re both out of alignment!” Moblit yells through the radio.

Jean grits his teeth. _Focus._ He pries his fingers off the memory and inhales slowly. “I got it, just—let me handle this, I’ve got it.”

The drift. The drift. Drift. Eren. Not Marco. Eren. Simulator. Now. He can still feel fringes of another memory, pain and kaiju and screaming, but that isn’t him, he’s focused, he sees the drift and the simulator screen—he looks over at his co-pilot, and Eren is frozen, eyes stretched wide, staring at something that isn’t there.

“Eren? Eren?” Jean reaches out with his mind, but Eren doesn’t budge.

“Jean, you’ve stabilized,” Moblit crackles, “but Eren’s way out, he’s chasing the RABIT!”

No, _no, no_ , Jesus fuckin’— _no._ Not now, he can’t be—but Jean knows Moblit is right, he can feel the fringes of pain and panic and despair, the taste of ashes and dry dust, crushed powdery cement floating in the air, the irony tang of blood—

“Eren!” Jean yells, desperately trying to pull his co-pilot back into the present. _School yourself, you must be calm. Stay calm for Eren._

“Eren,” he says steadily. “Eren, don’t let yourself get caught in a memory, it’s not real, it’s _just a memory_ —”

They’re walking back from school when it happens, when the first loud roar splits the air, when the first rumble grips the ground. Eren stops walking, and looks at the sky. _What’s happening?_ Mikasa looks at him, Armin lets out a small yelp, and runs off, and Eren wonders where Armin is going, but they run after him anyway. They turn the corner onto a wide street where traffic has stopped, people are screeching and crying and shrieking terror, running away, but Armin stands there silently, his mouth open, trying to speak, but Mikasa is the one to break their silence.

 _Kaiju,_  she says seriously, and there are policemen running to them, yelling _Where are your parents? Go to the refuge! Go to the refuge center!_ But Eren shakes his head, and he runs away from the policemen, towards his apartment complex, _they have to be there, Mom has to be there_ , and he runs and runs and tries not to vomit on the street it smells so bad, dust and cement and ashes and things are on fire and he chokes on the smoke, it claws at his throat, _no no no_ , _when I turn the corner the apartment will still be there, my mom will be coming out and we’ll go to the refuge together, I have to make sure she’s safe_ and Mikasa is yelling behind him, but he can’t hear her, he won’t hear her, _I have to find Mom—_

And he turns the corner and where his apartment building once stood there is instead a pile of rubble. He dodges past the owner of the grocery down the road and the homeless man who always smoked on the corner next to the alley, running, _MOM,_ and he sees a pair of arms and a small dark-haired head sticking out of a crack between the piles of concrete, _MOM,_ and he runs to it, _MOM_ , his hands grab at the rubble, trying to lift it, _Mikasa, Mikasa help me we have to get this off of her,_ but Mikasa doesn’t move and he screams _Mom, say something, it’s me, it’s Eren, I’m here, please say something, please say something_ and tears blur his vision, and his chest closes up _MOM PLEASE SAY SOMETHING_ and Mikasa puts a hand on his shoulder and says _You can’t save her_ but he shakes her off, slaps her small pale hand away _MOM IT’S ME IT’S EREN_ and he can’t lift it he can’t lift it his muscles scream in agony but he has to lift it he has to or she’ll die no she’s still alive she has to be alive she has to—

The kaiju roars behind him, it’s down the street, he can see it, in all its scaly, toothy, poisonous glory, and Mikasa is yelling now, _Eren it’s no use, we have to go, she’s dead,_ but he turns around and yells with more hatred than he intended _SHE’S NOT DEAD_. The kaiju brays again; its footsteps shake the ground with a startling boom, and he jumps, startled, and  Mikasa takes that opportunity to scoop him around the middle and start running away and he screams and punches and kicks, but her grip remains tight, and he curses her and uses every bad word that his mom told him not to use _MOM MOM MOM_ but she doesn’t move and instead the kaiju sweeps its scaly forearm across a building, sending rubble flying, landing on the pile of ruin where his apartment building is, and he digs his fists into the back of Mikasa’s jacket, screaming _this is not happening, this is not happening, she’s not dead, SHE’S NOT DEAD_ but the fact is she is gone, and he curses himself for being weak and useless even as they huddle in the refuge, he can’t stop shaking—

_Why is it that we can’t do anything but cry?_

_Why are we so weak? Why are we so weak we can’t save the ones we love?_

_Why couldn’t I save her? She’s gone and now—and now she’ll never come back._

_Why is it that the kaiju take so much away from us? Our homes. Our dreams. Our families. I can never go home again. I can never see Mom again._

_I’ll kill them all. I’ll punish them for what they did to me. To Mikasa. To Armin. To everyone._

_I have to._

He stands up, his fists balled by his sides, and Mikasa looks up and her eyes ask him what he is doing and he buries his nails into his palms and he says _I have to kill them all, every last one of them—_

“Eren!” Jean yells firmly. “Eren, it’s _not real._ ”

_I HAVE TO KILL EVERY LAST ONE OF THEM—EVERY LAST ONE—_

And Jean watches, his heart sinking, as Eren thrusts his left arm out, fingers splayed, and the blue and white and red and green holograms cluster around his wrist and elbow. His eyes still stare nowhere, his breathing falters, his lips pulled back to reveal clenched teeth— _EVERY LAST ONE—_

“Oh _no,_ ” Jean breathes, the anger clawing at the fringes of his consciousness. “No, Eren, _it’s just a memory_ —!”

“ _Weapon engage. Plasma cannon powering up._ ”

“Eren! _Eren!_ ” His co-pilot doesn’t move, and cursing, Jean reaches out to the radio. “Moblit, we have to take him offline!”

“It’s just a simulation—”

“ _Moblit, I can’t get him to snap out of it, we have to take him offline!”_

A slight hesitation, and then “Roger.”

_I HAVE TO KILL THEM ALL—_

“Eren, please, Eren listen to me, it’s just a memory, Eren—”

_Memory? Jean?_

“ _Weapons system disengage.”_

And the plasma cannon screen fades, and the simulation fades, and Jean feels the neural handshake disconnect, Moblit has come through. Breathing heavily, heart racing, he rips his helmet off, and runs around to Eren’s side. _God, please be okay._ “Eren!” he yells. _Please be okay._

Eren stumbles backwards a little bit, his eyes still wide and flickering back and forth, and Jean catches him, lowers him to the ground so Eren is half-sitting and half-lying down. A quick click of the clasps around Eren’s neck and his helmet is gone, his head propped up against Jean’s hand. “It’s okay, Eren, it’s over,” he says, and Eren looks up at him, blinking, not really sure if Jean’s face is real, trying to focus.

“What—did we—?” he croaks.

“Shh, it’s okay,” Jean murmurs. “It’s okay.”

_“Neural bridge exercise invalid. Drift sequence terminated._

Eren closes his eyes and exhales softly.

_“Would you like to try again?”_

***

“Hey, um.” Jean looks up to see Eren standing there, his face uncertain. “Can I sit here?”

“Oh. Yeah. Sure.” Jean shoves chicken in his mouth and closes his eyes. _God bless, I have tasted heaven at last._ Eren sits down across from him.

“Sorry. About this morning.” Eren looks down at his food.

“It’s all right. First drifts always kinda suck,” Jean says, shrugging and stuffing his face with bread. _God._ He hadn’t had bread in so long. He hadn’t had any real food in so long. What an amazing thing, to be in Hong Kong, to be in a port, to be able to fucking eat actual food. _Food._ The rations on the wall were downright shit; his hunger was the only thing that kept that stuff down, but now. Now. He’s practically living in luxury. He closes his eyes and savors the taste. _Bread._

“No, it’s not all right,” Eren insists. “I fucked up and—and I’m probably holding you back, like I know they want to get you out as soon as possible, you’re practically invaluable to the PPDC, with all your experience, and I’m—”

“Shut up,” Jean says, swallowing his bread with a swig of chocolate milk (oh that stuff brought him back to his childhood, what a time to be alive). “Shut up. You’re not holding anyone back. We’re co-pilots, all right? I trust you, you trust me. That’s how it works. You said it yourself, didn’t you?”

Eren blinks and does that thing with his eyebrows (what a thing, they furrow and raise at the same time and it is quirky and strange and a little bit amusing and fascinating, his eyebrows in general interest Jean, they are such strange ones, he can’t imagine where Eren had inherited them; he didn’t remember Grisha or Carla having such strange eyebrows—probably a recessive gene). “I guess so.” His voice still stumbles a little bit.

“Come on, you know so.” Jean looks down at Eren’s tray, and pauses, slightly perplexed: chicken, scalloped potatoes, bread, a carton of chocolate milk. Jean looks down at his own tray: half-eaten chicken, half-eaten scalloped potatoes, half-eaten bread, a half-full carton of chocolate milk. The realization hits him, and he promptly chokes on his food.

“Shit— _shit_ , are you okay?” Eren leans back to avoid the spray. “Jesus, cover your mouth, man.”

“Shut the fuck up, Jaeger.” Jean glares at him, and chugs the rest of his chocolate milk down. “Look at your tray.”

“Um, okay?” Eren looks at his food. “So what?”

“Now look at my tray.”

Eren surveys Jean’s half-eaten food. “Is there a point to this?”

“Don’t you notice anything?”

Eren’s turquoise eyes dart back and forth. “You have chicken… and I have chicken… No, we have all the same things for lunch.”

“Right.” Jean swallows. “Like it or not, we are in this together. And we are drift-compatible, as this”—he gestures to their trays—“proves, and as the drift this morning proves.”

“But—”

“I know, it didn’t end well, but up until then, it was strong. I know. Didn’t you feel it, how strong it was? And on my part, I’m sorry. When you drift with me, you don’t just drift with me. You’re drifting with my last co-pilot, too.”

“Marco.”

“Marco,” Jean confirms. “His memories, his feelings and”—his voice catches a little bit, and Jean shuts his mouth, not trusting himself with any more words. It doesn’t matter whether he says it anymore in the drift, Eren will surely have felt it, and if he hasn’t, then he will in the future. There’s no point talking about it. “Yeah. Everything.”

“I know,” Eren says. “I felt it.”

That again. That strangely accepting, soldierly, dutiful Eren Jaeger, those eyes that had seen too much pain and misery in their short life, that spirit that had been through hell and back. The officers at the Academy might have tried to break his character, throwing tirade after tirade of exercises and simulations and knowledge at him, but the look in his eyes tell Jean that they did not succeed, however close they came. They might have drifted, Jean and Eren, but Eren is still an enigma wrapped up in a mystery tied up with a riddle. _I have to kill them all_ , he’d said on day one, and Jean thought then he had Eren figured out: a rash, stupidly idealistic and stupidly unrealistic asshole who ran his mouth where he shouldn’t have, but then this, this—what do you call it. There is not a word in Jean’s brain for this, and he’s looked, he’s scrambled and unscrambled his vocabulary for this person. Eren simply doesn’t make sense.

But no, at the same time, Eren does make sense; _I have to kill them all,_ he’d said, and with that distress and desperation, that controlled wrath, that fierce determination, that desire to will something into existence so much that the entire of the awareness is completely and utterly focused on that something, Eren has much of that. The pain and the loss and the indignant anger, he can understand where that came from, _I have to kill them all_ , wanting justified revenge against the kaiju is not unsurprising after that level of agony. To lose your mother in that way, to be so weak and so helpless to be unable to do anything, that is all understandable. Maybe now Eren is not so detestable, maybe now that idea is not so spontaneously ridiculous, maybe now Jean can accept that and embrace that.

Jean stabs at his potatoes, ignoring his stupid, wandering thoughts. He has to trust the brat, but that doesn’t mean they are friends. There are plenty of pilot teams that weren’t friends— _because they’re more than that, they’re fucking, probably_ —and Jean nearly misses the tray, stabbing with his fork, no no no, they might be co-pilots, but he is not about to go out and _fuck_ Eren fucking Jaeger, fuck his stupid daring eyes and fuck his stupid solid sturdy-looking hands and arms and muscles and fuck his stupid disheveled hair and fuck his stupid eyebrows and fuck how good he looks in that stupid hoodie with the obnoxious shoelace thing on front, _he is not going to fuck Eren Jaeger._ That is out of the question.

_Swallow your pride, Jean. You have a co-pilot to look out for._

 “The point is,” Jean says, eyes still fixed on his potatoes, trying not to show how angry he is at himself, “there’s still shit to work through and shit to sort out, on both our parts, but today, today was good. You did well. It was a good, strong, solid drift. Even Moblit said so.”

“Really?” The confidence seems to bud in Eren’s eyes again. Good. Having a change of heart in combat, inside the drift, that will not do.

“Really.” He points at Eren’s tray with his fork. “Are you gonna eat? We still have training after this.”

“Um, to be honest.” Eren scratches the back of his head. “I’m not really hungry. My stomach hasn’t really cooperated well with the drifting thing.”

“Yeah, that happens a lot,” Jean says. “Maybe just for today we can opt out. I gotta move into our new room, anyway.”

“Oh yeah. Yeah, I have to do that too.”

Jean taps Eren’s tray with his fork. “Eat your lunch first.”

“I’m really—”

“ _Eat._ ”

Eren sighs, rubs his nose absently with his right hand, and takes his fork in his left. Jean blinks.

Marco rubbed his nose whenever he was thinking very hard, even in combat, and he always rubbed his pinky-toe on the ground when he was uncomfortable, grinning shyly, and smiled down at the ground when he was embarrassed, and always let you think you’d won during a fight, but then would come back with a vicious left hook out of nowhere, and then you’d be down and he’d be laughing and helping you up.

Eren is nothing like Marco. Drifting with Eren is as different as it could get with Marco—but no, not really is it? When he drifted with Marco, he felt like he was walking slowly into a warm bath, and when he got to the bottom and submerged himself he would be greeted with a warm hug and a completeness. Drifting with Eren, this morning was like plunging into a pristine swimming pool headfirst, with the rush of bubbles tickling his skin and face, and then the calmness that follows, the water caressing his hair so that it stood up and flowed in the current, and he pushes himself and move easily through the water, the strange empty underwater silence filling his ears. And then he pushes through and swims, and there is a direction to where he is going, a great focus, but also a great calm, his heart does not rush or slow, and his mind is empty but complete. Complete, but not in the same way it was with Marco. They both fill him, but in a different way—

But does he have to pick one over the other? That isn’t fair to either of them. Guilt roils in his stomach, even though he knows at his core that Marco would not care, Marco was accepting of things that he could not control—he gets a feeling that had he been the one who died, Marco would have dealt with it a lot better, a lot healthier than Jean had.

 _Whatever._ He doesn’t want to let go of Marco, and it is stupidly selfish of him to want so. A Jaeger pilot cannot afford to be selfish. Marco would want him to move on and focus on bonding with Eren, focus on creating a stronger, more effective drift with his new co-pilot. Marco would want him to be _happy_ , but Jean cannot be happy without Marco. Jean is empty without Marco. And an empty person cannot be happy. An empty person can only ever be empty.

“Okay, look, I ate my lunch, you chode.” Eren leans back, and throws his fork on his tray. “And I didn’t vomit.”

“I’m proud of you,” Jean says dryly.

“You should be.” Eren licks his lips, and it’s not meant to be sexual at all, he’s just—getting that last bit of sauce hanging on the corner of his mouth but Jean tightens his grip on his fork anyway and grimaces.

“Let’s go,” he says, standing up abruptly, and making smartly for his room.

Eren stumbles after him. “Hey, why suddenly the grumpy demeanor?”

“Nothing,” Jean snaps back. “It’s not you, don’t worry about it.”

But it is all Eren, all Eren and his stupidly _attractive_ face—oh now he’s gone and done it, he’s gone and thought it, there is no turning back from this shit now. _Marco, what the fuck am I going to do? I have you, I don’t need Eren_ , and from far away he can hear Marco laughing at him like Marco always does, and god damn it, _Marco come back,_ but Marco shakes his head and instead Eren is the one laughing at him, Eren’s stupid blunt throaty laugh that grates obnoxiously on his ears. Stupid. Jean angrily throws his stuff back into his bag while Eren laughs at him in his head, and smiles at him in his head, and spins swiftly with a _bo_ staff in his two sweaty stupid hands in his head. Damn it. _Damn it._ He trudges to their new room, designated with huge numbers painted on the patch of wall next to it in bold black paint, trying to ignore the feel of Eren’s hands on his throat and face—even if they’d been fighting, Eren’s hands were warm and weirdly soft for a pilot, for Jean’s hands are tough and calloused and worn after years of punching gloves and pummeling kaiju, but Eren’s hands feel like a child’s hands. It’s almost as though Eren had never been to the hellhole they called the Jaeger Academy.

 _And with his maturity, he might not have been_ , Jean mumbles bitterly to himself as he lumbers inside their new room, where Eren is already there, rubbing his nose and staring very hard at the bunk beds. He looks up as Jean enters.

“Did you say something?” Eren asks in his stupidly naïve voice.

“ _What?_ No!” Jean says, and then swallows. _Check yourself, kid._ “I mean, no. No. I was not talking to myself.”

Smooth. Real smooth. _He’s your fucking co-pilot and he is a shitty brat and you still fuck it up. God_ damn _it, why are you so awkward?_ If there was no one around then Jean would promptly have gone straight to the wall and started banging his head softly on it. But since that is not the case, and instead Eren fucking Jaeger of all people is standing in the room with him, Jean just wants to shrivel up into a slice of kaiju shit and die on the spot.

“So, top or bottom?”

If Jean had been drinking something, he would have spit it out. “ _What?!”_

Eren flicks his eyes from the bed to Jean in an _are-you-serious_ kind of manner. “The bunk, you dumbfuck. Top or bottom?”

Jean blinks. _Oh._ Jesus fucking Christ, how could he have been so stupid? No, the last thing on Eren’s mind is sex. The kid is so wrapped up in killing kaiju that it’s entirely possible that he didn’t ever know how sex worked, let alone _gay_ sex. He probably doesn’t even swing that way. Jean is making shit up in his head and he hates himself for it and—what he really needs right now is to. Just. Go out for a good run. Maybe go a few rounds with the punching bag, with Eren’s picture taped onto it. Hell, he could probably go out and kill some kaiju right now. Even simulator kaiju would work. Moblit would hate it, the short-notice thing, Moblit hates when shit happens without careful planning beforehand (which makes Jean wonder why the guy is even in J-tech), but Jean could definitely use the practice. He isn’t _totally_ out of shape, but thinking back on it, he realizes that he could have definitely taken some of those candidates out two moves earlier. Jesus. Shadis from the Academy would be having a field day if he saw how Jean had fought today. Fucking hell, Jean had let this fucking twenty-one-year-old green piece of dildo shit give him a hard time. Fucking hell. He was a fucking Jaeger pilot. Just because they’d spent longer than the other candidates locked in battle did not mean they were drift compatible.

 _But what about after that, Jean? You two drifted so magnificently,_ the little insidious voice in his head whispers and at this point Jean is about to punch the wall out of frustration and also he really does need to sit down right about now because he can feel his pants getting a little bit tight in the area and he _absolutely cannot be getting a boner in front of Eren fucking Jaeger._ No. Nope. Fucking hell, no. Fuck. How fucking embarrassing. Where is it even coming from, anyway? Not from how nice Jaeger smells. Definitely not from how nice his arms look with the sleeves of his stupid pretentious hipster shoelace hoodie rolled up. And most definitely not from those stupid huge-ass eyes staring at him. Nope. No way.

“Hey, asswipe, are you gonna answer me?” Eren looks rightly pissed off now, and Jean scrambles for an answer.

“Bottom,” he says very quickly. “Bottom.” And he drops his bag and sits down very fast on the bunk, puts his hands in his pockets.

“Cool,” says Eren. He throws his bag on the top bunk and turns to leave.

“Going somewhere?” Jean asks.

“Yeah.” Eren ruffles his hair, looks in the mirror, makes a few weird faces that are strangely attractive, and makes for the door. “Coming, shithead?”

If he goes, he might be able to walk off the eager thing in his pants, but then Eren would see it. Is there a point, though, to hiding a boner from Eren fucking Jaeger? He’d see it anyway, in the drift, if Jean keeps thinking about it. Well. No. He could just not think about it. He could just not think about it when they drifted. He could just get rid of the boner and then not think about it anymore. It isn’t like he got it because of Eren fucking Jaeger. Nope. Nothing like that at all. It just so happened that his penis decided to stand up. For absolutely no reason at all. It’s a thing that happens. _It’s a thing that happens._ Why justify a physiological reaction? It just happens. The thing practically has a mind of its own.

“I’m good,” Jean says, pulling off his boots and curling up in his bed.   _Shut up, Jean, shut up. Stop telling yourself that your boner is pointless. Pointless boners happen. YES, I KNOW THAT. Shut the fuck up, Jean. Just. Stop. Stop._

“All right. Bye, you chode,” Eren says behind him, and the door booms shut.

“You—you asshole,” Jean mumbles to himself, and starts rubbing. _You douchefuck. I—unh—god, I hate you so much. Call me a chode again and I’ll—unh—fuck you up in the ass dry until you scream, you insolent little—ah—fuck you, man. Fuck you, Eren Jaeger. Fuck your stupid thick eyebrows and your stupid eyes that probably—ah—laser holes into people’s souls or something—ah—how the fuck are they actually that bright, anyway. Nobody’s eyes are actually that color. It’s literally the color of a fucking Caribbean ocean or something like that—ah—ah—Eren, Eren, Eren, go die in hell—ah. Ah. God I’m going to tear your hair out—and then I’m going to break your arm—and then I’m going to punch you in the face and leave more bruises—ah—bruises, yes bruises all over, black and blue and purple and green. And then I’m going to crack every single one of your ribs, you fucking shitface, and I will tie you up and you will be more useless than kaiju shit—ah—ah_ — _ah!_

The heat bubbles over, licks all of his nerves electric white-hot, and he gasps, _it’s so good_ , and he shudders and curls his toes, so good, so good, so good, _Eren—_ the name is barely more than a breath, but he sees Eren’s eyes, dark and unyielding, and Eren’s mouth, lips slightly parted—

The ecstasy subsides, and he opens his eyes to find a hand dripping in white. He groans a little bit, _damn it, Jean, why did you do that. Marco. Why the fuck did I do that._ No, Marco’s still laughing at him, Marco’s laughing, not mockingly but Jean still wants to crawl under his covers and die. _Did I just wank to Eren Jaeger?_ Eren. Fucking. Jaeger. Out of all of the people in the world. Eren’s laughing at him now, he’s practically rolling on the floor _You wanked to me, oh my god!_ Yup. Yup, he can definitely see that happening. True drift compatibility at work, isn’t it. To be fair, if Eren had wanked to Jean, he’d probably laugh too but Jean, Jean is the older, the more experienced, the more… _composed_ of the two. Eren _should_ be wanking to him, if he wanks to anyone at all. Which is unlikely, because the only thing that the kid is focused on is killing kaiju.

Jean rolls over, burying his face in his pillow. What the fuck. _What the fuck._ He’s barely known this kid like a day? Two days? And now he’s _getting off_ to him? _Jean, you are an absolute disgrace. An absolute disgrace. Go wash your hands right now._

“What am I gonna do now, Marco?” Jean asks the darkness, but no one replies.

***

Over the next few days, Eren comes back very late at night wearing a bandage over his neck, and Jean uses more force than he needs to during sparring sessions. The boner incident hasn’t repeated itself, but he wakes up one morning with an erection between his legs, and Eren says nothing of it. There is nothing to say of it; it’s morning wood, it happens to everyone with a penis, and Eren knows that. And Jean doesn’t question Eren’s strange bandages. There is nothing to say of that either; they are bandages, and not everything has to be in the open. In fact, they get along rather well, as well as you can get with Jean and Eren, until the next drift exercise.

And that, that is a disaster.

“ _Neural interface drift, initiating…_ ”

And when they connect Eren bursts out laughing and the only thought running through both of their minds is _oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, Jean wanked to Eren_ and Jean mutters to himself in mortification while Eren tries to laugh it off. It’s terrible. Eren’s trying not to giggle as they move in unison to grapple the simulator kaiju in front of them,  and Jean is instead picturing Eren’s face on the simulator kaiju, and trying to punch its face as hard as he can. But their simulator-Jaeger struggles to respond to his thoughts, and not theirs, and the simulator ends with the kaiju ripping their head off, and Jean latches on briefly to Marco’s death again and, well—it is a disaster. Moblit sighs dejectedly into the radio, and Levi, who’s overseeing their exercise, lets out his trademark “ _tch!_ ” of disappointment, laced with extra frustration, and Jean gets a sinking feeling in his stomach.

Hours later, he still feels it, lying down on his bunk, steaming and fuming at himself still, and Eren is in the bathroom taking a shower after training. The clock reads six in the evening.

“Hey, Jaeger pilot?”

“What,” Jean snaps, maybe harsher than he means, but “Jaeger pilot” rubs his nerves the wrong way and he’s already aggravated because today was all his fault and he may or may not have slammed Eren into the ground harder than usual because the brat is pissing him off more than usual today. Everything is pissing him off more than usual today.

“Did you _actually_ wank to me?”

And there it is. Jean lets out a slight groan of irritation and rolls over, hiding his face in his pillow. Like he doesn’t already want to die. “Can we not—talk about that. Please.”

“You fucknugget. We’re co-pilots.” Eren sticks his head out of the bathroom door. “We’re not supposed to hide things from each other.”

Jean doesn’t answer. He doesn’t want to answer. He isn’t looking, but Eren is probably doing his stupid goo-goo eyes thing, and Jean fucking hates when he does the goo-goo eyes, because then Eren looks like some stupid lost puppy and one look into those stupid lost puppy eyes means that Jean is powerless to have a free will of his own again. Marco had those stupid eyes too, except they were less stupid and less annoying—damn it, Jean.

“Come on, Jaeger pilot. I’ll show you my secret if you admit yours.”

“What secrets do you have?” Jean mutters crossly into his pillow. “You’re a fucking open book.”

“No, I’m fucking not,” Eren says indignantly, coming out of the bathroom, and plops his butt onto Jean’s bed (Jean kicks at the covers frantically, but Eren doesn’t budge). “I haven’t even told Mikasa or Armin about this yet.”

He reaches for the bandage covering his neck and shoulder blade, and Jean realizes that Eren is without a shirt. _Of course he’s not wearing a shirt, he just walked out of the shower. He just walked out of the shower. Why the fuck is that unusual at all? It’s not like he showers with a fucking shirt on._

Slowly, Eren peels off the bandage, revealing dark lines and red smears: a bird emerging out of flames, its wings curving out of his spine and over onto the back side of his shoulder. It looks—it looks really cool, and Jean wants one. “You got a tattoo? Didn’t that hurt?”

“Yup,” Eren says proudly, looking over his shoulder. “It’s not like it hurt any more than the shit that they throw at you at the Academy. And also—” Eren’s eyes flick up to look at Jean. “Phoenixes are pretty swaggy.”

Jean cringes. “Don’t say ‘swaggy’ in front of me. People stopped saying that like five years ago, man.”

“Shut the fuck up, dickface.”

They pause a little bit. Jean picks at his calloused knuckles, even though he knows it’s not good for them because they’ll just blister again when he goes for the punching bag, but it feels good, to rip that skin off. And it takes his mind off of the fact that Eren is sitting on his bed, without a shirt, all of his well-defined, well-earned muscles on display, and especially his neck, which looks. Really good. And his collarbones, which also look good. And everything, which looks good. Jean hates himself, sure, but he hates Eren more for being so attractive and so stupid at the same time, and he hates whatever fates stuck them together and made them drift-compatible. No, that was Armin’s fault—okay, so he hates Armin. And he hates Aberrant for what it did to Marco, because if not for that he wouldn’t sitting here with Eren sitting on his bed looking as good as he does.

“Hey, Jean.” Eren’s voice lifts Jean’s chin. “Do you actually… like me like that?”

Jesus Christ. He asked the question. He asked the question. Jesus Christ. Jean looks back down at his calloused knuckles. Frankly, Jean himself doesn’t even know. Because, well, as much as Eren pisses him off and annoys him with all this stupid shit, he doesn’t—mind the guy that much. And they’ve drifted already. He knows Eren and Eren’s hopes and dreams and memories and thoughts and rhythms and well, what he’s seen isn’t terrible. And Eren’s seen—all of his—baggage and everything, and well, it isn’t like Eren is judging him. They went through the same shit at the Academy, the sweat and blood and tears, and they went through the pain of loss and helplessness and the despair that the kaiju brought them, and they are going through this now. But more than that? Their first drift, Eren’s legs and arms collapsing, Jean running, breathing, praying that Eren was okay, that Eren was going to be okay—no, no, that didn’t have anything to do with anything. And neither did the fact that he fucking wanked to Eren fucking Jaeger.

Jean opens his mouth to say something, but Eren has already leaped off the bed. “Never mind. Come on, put a shirt on. We’re going out.”

 “We are?”

“Yeah.” Eren’s voice drifts from the closet. “Dinner with Reiner and Bertholdt. And there might be a few other pilots there too. I thought I told you already.”

“Really?” Jean’s stomach twists. Reiner and Bertholdt are fine with him, god knows how long they’d been friends, but Erd and Gunter and Petra intimidate him, let alone the pilots of the fifth Jaeger that he still hasn’t met yet. And he doesn’t want to see Levi again, especially not after the fiasco that was their drift. _All your fault, all your fault, all your fault._

Eren pokes his head out. “Don’t worry, Levi won’t be there. He’s got other stuff to do.”

Jean furrows his eyebrows. “How’d you know what I was th—”

“—Thinking?” Eren grins in that stupid way again and taps his temple. “Drift-compatible.”

God. Jean puts his face in his hands. That is going to become so annoying.

“Hey, dipshit, are you going to get off your lazy ass and come, or am I gonna have to drag you out?”

Jean sighs. “Coming.”

They leave the Shatterdome out the back exit, onto the street. It’s raining, typical of Hong Kong, but neither of them thought to bring an umbrella, so they’re dripping water onto the floor of the train. Eren’s hair clings to his face, and Jean tries to ignore how good it looks, but the rush hour crowd pushes them close together, so that Jean can feel Eren’s elbow poking into his stomach, and the outsides of their feet push into each other. The train lurches and Jean stumbles a little, stepping on Eren’s feet, and a curse leaks out between Eren’s teeth.

“Shit, shit, sorry,” Jean mumbles, a little annoyed with himself, and he fully expects Eren to grumble back at him, but Eren shrugs and instead flicks a glance at his phone.

They hop trains twice, and finally climb the stairs at Tsim Tsa Shui, ascending to a chaos of Hong Kong at dusk, not dark enough for the lights to come on yet, but the signs flash neon and phosphorescent, and people bustle past, walking with purpose, speaking loudly in Cantonese. It sounds all very angry and strange to Jean, and he stands there, a little in stupor, listening, seeing, smelling the smoke and dense humidity and the vague smells of food cooking in the restaurants, before Eren waves an obnoxious hand over his eyes. “Keep up, dipshit,” he says, and sets off, Jean tripping behind him.

The restaurant is a Korean one— _we’re not going for Chinese?_ Jean asks and Eren rolls his eyes and tells him to shut up _—_ and Reiner and Bertholdt have already picked clean the little dishes of vegetables set out in front of them.

“Sorry,” Reiner says with an unapologetic grin. “Couldn’t help ourselves.”

“I didn’t eat any, I swear,” Bertholdt says but Reiner cuts him off.

“Please, you ate that whole dish of bean sprouts right there, don’t lie to them.” He looks over his shoulder, and signals the waiter. “Hey, a bottle of soju, please.”

“Soju? What’s that?” Jean asks, feeling incredibly stupid, but the server answers his question by bringing a tall green bottle and four shot glasses to the table. Reiner uncaps the bottle, lines the glasses up, and generously pours until all four are full to the brim.

“Gentlemen,” he says, pushing the glasses to everyone’s corner table, and raising his own. “To Jean Kirstein’s glorious return to Jaeger piloting.”

Jean feels heat dust the tips of his ears, and he looks over to see Eren grinning at him. _No, don’t be stupid, everyone’s looking at you,_ except that isn’t true because Bertholdt is looking at his glass like it is the ledge of a very tall building and he is unsure whether to step off, while Reiner has his eyes closed, and has thrown the shot of soju into his throat. God damn. Jean closes his eyes and drinks, feeling the sharp buzz of alcohol travel down his chest. Eren was good to take him out. He’s been so tense and uptight lately. He just needs to forget about everything, forget Marco, forget the fact that he wanked to Eren Jaeger, forget how he’s alone and not alone, forget how he’s unhappy and not unhappy at the same time. Alcohol is the answer.

“Another round!” he says to Reiner, slamming his glass down, and Reiner laughs, and pours him another full glass.

The meat they cook themselves (or Bertholdt cooks, as Reiner and Jean and Eren are too busy putting back shots of soju; if they tried to cook, they’d most definitely burn their fingers) and it tastes satisfying, meaty and fatty in the perfect proportions, and a spicy kick to round it all out. The night blurs into pleasantly warm laughter and sizzling fat hitting the flat grill and the strong burn of alcohol, and Jean is laughing at something Reiner or Eren said, but he doesn’t know what they said, only that it was funny. All of the tension from the last week—what tension? Tension? Fighting robots and giant… giant lizards… snow or something… Nah, who cared? Jean wants what he wants, and right now, sitting there, he wants another helping of that beef because _damn_ it is so delicious, and he wants to ruffle Eren’s hair, because it looks really soft. He puts his hand on Eren’s head, and giggles, its softness tickles his palm. Eren slaps his hand away, but his slaps are feeble, and he’s laughing, leaning on the table—“he” could be anyone, but frankly they are all laughing, and they are all leaning on the table, mumbling shit. Hours fly, they stagger out, and Jean has his arm around Eren. He doesn’t know how or when it got there but it feels good there, and Eren is very warm and nice in the cool night, and they stumble on the train, and Jean sits down and pulls Eren down next to him, and Eren laughs, and his voice is mellow as butter and it makes Jean happy. Eren’s head on Jean’s shoulder makes Jean happy. Hell, Eren makes him happy. Eren fucking Jaeger.

“You gotta kill all the kaiju,” he says to Eren, and Eren laughs again.

“I gotta. I gotta kill all of ’em,” Eren drawls, waving a hand vaguely and Jean turns his head and smells Eren’s hair, and it smells like the smoke of Hong Kong harbor and the rich smell of the barbecued meat and the clean trace of shampoo.

“You smell nice,” he mumbles into Eren’s hair, and they get off the train and take a cab back to the Shatterdome, and Eren is leaning on Jean, or is Jean leaning on Eren? They are leaning on each other, and it feels nice and warm, and then they are getting out and Eren is supporting him. maybe

“Hey, hey dipshit,” he mumbles. “I kinda, maybe, you know, I love you okay. I love you. You should stop thinking about your mommy because then you’ll be sad and it sucks when you’re sad. Yeah? Yeah? And you smell nice. Really nice. How do you do that? How do you do that nice-smell thing…”

“Yeah,” Eren says sleepily next to him. “Yeah.”

They stumble into their room. It is past midnight, and Jean’s knees are tired. They buckle and he lands on his bed, and his arm pulls Eren down with him, and Eren’s kind of heavy, but it is a good, solid, satisfying heavy, and Jean is happy, their legs are tangled, and his arm is still around Eren’s shoulders, the other hand in Eren’s hair. “Wow. Really warm. Really, really warm,” Jean mumbles, and Eren’s huge laser Caribbean-blue eyes find him and his mouth opens a little bit, and Jean licks his lips, he so badly wants to kiss him, but there are too many layers; Eren’s hoodie is too thick and his jeans are too thick, and even Jean’s jacket is too thick, there is too much, get rid of the layers, get rid of ’em. His fingers travel down to Eren’s waist. His thoughts have realigned themselves and now they are straight and lucid, marching in clear logical lines after another, and they all say the same thing: _want Eren. Need Eren._

“I love you,” he sighs, almost inaudibly; the words leak out by themselves and though his thoughts are straight he doesn’t know if they’re his thoughts or the soju’s thoughts. A small part of him sitting in the dark corner of his brain says _it’s the soju_ , but his body doesn’t care, and his cock certainly doesn’t care, and Eren seems to know it, because Eren brings his mouth down to the small spot right under Jean’s ear, where his jaw ends and the tendons of his neck begins, and it feels so good, and he says that, he tells him, “Eren, it’s so good.”

Eren moans very quietly, and Jean sighs and sinks down into welcoming warmth. The last thing he feels before sleep is a slight taste of Eren on his tongue.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God. I watched the movie Pacific Rim like ten times to get all the Jaeger AI dialogue. Which reminds me, those kiddos who told they haven't seen PacRim yet: WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE. Here. [Have a link](http://www.videoweed.es/file/d34aa1b1fa2e6). Go watch it and love it.
> 
> Thank you all for reading and leaving comments and kudos, it means a lot! :)


	3. number eight

“Jean,” Eren murmurs. “You have really bad morning breath.”

Jean pries his eyes open. They want to say shut, because he is still tired, and he still wants to sleep, but no, Eren just had to wake him up. And Eren is lying on top of him, all warm and heavy and it feels kind of nice and—wait. Eren is lying on top of him.

His eyes fly wide open, and he pushes Eren off to the side. “Get off of me, you dipshit.”

Eren blinks up at him with those annoyingly childish eyes. “Wow, good morning to you, too. I was all comfortable and everything.”

“Whatever,” Jean snaps, maybe harsher than he means, but he rolls over, facing away from Eren, and the rush of embarrassment hits him like a crashing wave. God. All of last night should just be filed under _To Never Be Remembered Again, Ever._ Fuck Eren for taking him out. He should have just stayed behind and gone to bed extra early. Not that it would have helped; he still has trouble sleeping a lot of the time, but maybe for once he’d have dreamless sleep. Maybe he could have gone through the thick pile of memos and information that sits on his desk. Maybe he could have gone for a jog. But no, instead he’d gone out and he’d gotten drunk and done stupid embarrassing things. Smelling Eren’s hair? Kissing Eren? _Telling Eren “I love you”?_ Jean never keeps his mouth shut when he’s drunk, and he should have known better; he should have passed up the soju, damn Reiner for—for getting it out in the first place. _No, Jean, it’s your fault, accept responsibility for it._

“Well. I’m going to go shower. You wanna come?”

“ _What?_ ” sputters Jean, but Eren laughs.

“God, I was just joking. You’re such a prude for a twenty-six year old.”

“Shut up,” Jean mutters, although— _Jesus,_ Eren and warm water and no clothes— _Jean Kirstein. Control yourself. You are not going to fuck Eren Jaeger._ _No, not like I was going to in the first place! God, Jean. God._

It brings him to another horrifying realization. Jesus Christ. Did he fuck Eren last night? No, no he can’t have, he’s still wearing boxers. Okay. Good. But still. God. What was up with that—that sleeping in the same bed thing. _When_ did that happen. When did anything happen? Only a week or two ago he was punching this fuckface in the stomach, relishing in Eren’s wince of pain, and now—now? Two weeks felt such a long time, but now he stops to think about it, it doesn’t feel very long at all. The past is in the past, and the present, the present is the one he feels most. The present is what anyone feels the most. Maybe he should take advantage of the moment. They are Rangers, damn it, and they might not live after their deployment, even if it’s their first. Becoming a Ranger is signing your life away to the greater good, and Jean should stop living and _live._ Is that what Eren’s doing? Laughing like he may not laugh in the future, fighting like he may never fight again, embracing the pain so exquisitely that Jean wonders how Eren does not break. Look at Jean, lying here trying to forget what happened, even if it felt so good, he remembers that, it felt good—and look at Eren, who walks out of the shower, no regrets for what he’s done, living so passionately it is intimidating. Is that it? Eren is intimidating him? _Shut up, Jean._ That is not what is happening. Jean should be intimidating Eren.

But no, no, Jean closes his eyes, what is real is not what Jean expects. Nothing is. And their repeated failed drifts fill them with frustration, but Eren’s frustration is stronger, Jean has felt it—his own frustration is half-hearted and shallow, pouring through his fingers faster than he thinks, and he lies down and then he has nothing except emptiness and a hazy feeling of despair. He reaches out for Marco, and finds Eren. Eren is his lifeline. He loses Eren, and he might as well rip up the bits of his good nature left over after Marco’s death.  _Stop. Stop,_ but does not stop, and Jean wants to sleep more and forget, but then Eren is there again, the tips of his disheveled hair clinging to his forehead, eyes fresh from the morning shower, “Are you awake? Breakfast? Shower?” And Jean nearly snaps at him, _you’re not my fucking mom,_ but Eren has no mom, only an agonizingly treasured image of hazel eyes and soft laughter and a teasing pulled ear, so Jean says nothing and rolls out of bed.

 Eren does not joke any more that day, and Jean is alone, wrapped up in his thoughts—they fail the drift again, because Jean will not stop latching onto the memories: Marco smiling and laughing and holding his hand in the dark, Marco sleeping while Jean counted the freckles on his face, Marco breathing into the glass of his helmet next to Jean in the Conn-Pod, Marco telling him “you can sit here” with the sweet innocence of childhood, Marco faking a basketball shot in his driveway and dribbling past him and laughing, Marco teaching him calculus while Jean daydreamed about kissing the happy mouth in front of him. He will not stop, and their fights in the Kwoon are not as heated as before. A lot of the time, Jean ends up on the ground, and he puts up with the soreness in his body with no complaints, only thoughts of Eren which he hastily tries to white out and correct into Marco’s freckles and doe eyes, but no use. _When will Marco come back?_ Never.

They eat dinner in silence. There is nothing to talk about—except the way Eren fidgets, draws his fingers through his hair, rearranges his food on his tray, Jean can tell that Eren needs to talk, but Jean is not ready, and both of them know that. The words stick in his stomach, hard rocks in his abdomen, and he cannot breathe them out. Maybe alcohol will help but Jean refuses to relinquish his self-control over to that mind-controlling poison, so Eren drinks alone and leans on Jean’s shoulder and laughs. It is sickening and drunken and more sincere than anything Jean can muster up sober, so Jean bears his co-pilot to the bottom bunk and sleeps on top. He doesn’t want to fail the drift tests anymore, but failing the drift test means they will never be the first choice to be deployed, especially not with Petra and Levi ahead of them, and Erd and Gunter ahead of them, and Bertholdt and Reiner ahead of them. And then he won’t have to go through that again. Having Marco ripped out of his soul again. Having Eren ripped out of his soul. He sleeps uneasily, and he wakes up, and the next day is the same. And the next. And the next.

His sleep was dreamless until one night.

***

Jean wakes up first, to the pleasant sensation of Marco Bott’s slow steady breath on his neck, his comfortable weight resting on Jean’s body, and the less-welcome woman’s voice that is the Jaeger AI.

“ _Atlas Reaper, report to Bay 07, level 842. Kaiju codename: Deviant. Category 3…”_

“Ah, man,” Marco mumbles onto Jean’s chest. The blanket is warm and he doesn’t want to move, neither of them do, but they must; the lights flicker on in their dormitory, and Jean blinks, his eyes adjusting.  Marco props himself on his elbows and grins at Jean. “Well. Looks like we’re being deployed again.”

“Looks like it,” Jean murmurs, grinning. He can see Marco’s big brown eyes in the dimness, and they still make his heart skip a beat, every time. He puts a hand on Marco’s face, his thumb stroking Marco’s jaw, his cheeks, his eyebrows, his freckles—he may never see or feel that again. They could die in that Jaeger, but as long as Jean could be with Marco, that would be all right. He wouldn’t have to live without him. He places a kiss on Marco’s lips, soft and warm  and sleepy.

“Ready to get that next kaiju kill?” Such confidence glimmers in Marco’s eyes, brown and soft and gorgeous, and Jean melts. He could lie in that bed and stare at those eyes forever.

“Yeah,” Jean says. “Get off me, buddy.”

Marco laughs and eases himself off the bed into a standing position. “Come on, let’s get dressed.”

“I kind of don’t want to,” Jean says lazily, rolling over. “Your butt looks pretty cute without any pants on.”

“Shut up, we have a city of two million to defend,” Marco says. “What are we dawdling for?”

Marco is right. Marco, the dutiful one, the sweet, responsible, talented child. Jean’s wonderful co-pilot and probably soul mate, if you believe in those kinds of things. And Jean didn’t originally; but drifting with Marco, being one with Marco, being the same mind as Marco, learning Marco’s thoughts and patterns and rhythms and the beat of his heart, how it sped up in combat, how it skips a beat when he looks at Jean—Marco might as well be his soul mate. _God, Jean_. He’s so mushy. He should get dressed like Marco is doing right now.

“Stop ogling me, we have to get suited up,” Marco says, but he’s laughing, and Jean grins at him, even as Dr. Hange bangs the door and yells “WAKE UP, LOVEBIRDS!” loud enough to try to embarrass them, but neither of them care. Jean shares one last lingering smile with his partner, savoring the soft planes of Marco’s face, the freckles that sprinkle liveliness into them—and they put on their jumpsuits and leather jackets and head to the bay.

The technicians fit them into their drivesuits, which are starting to show signs of wear and tear, but they still hold solid, and they still will wear them until they fall apart. _Armor is expensive to make nowadays, boys. We are at war._ No matter. Jean can push through that. He will hold on to Marco and the kaiju may throw punches and acid and whatever, but—and Jean looks over at Marco while they drill the plates of the body armor together—Marco is beautiful, and without Marco he will have nothing to hold onto. Marco is his anchor, his center. And without his anchor Jean may sink into the depths of who knows where.

“ _Neural drift sequence, initiating…”_

And Jean inhales, and welcomes Marco into his head, embraces Marco in his head, and the sweetness that is Marco’s consciousness mixes with his, and they are dropped into the churning oceans, the stormy rain pounding on the head of the Jaeger. It is a good white noise to drown out the distracting thoughts of having to get up at ridiculous hours of the night. The rush of being in a Jaeger is flooding their systems, the invulnerability, the immense strength and power that flexes with their muscles; Jean’s palms tingle at the prospect of beating up kaiju, they inadvertently clench into fists, and beside him Marco does the same. _You ready for this, Marco?_ Jean thinks, grinning at him, and Marco laughs, and Jean laughs with him. They are more than ready. They have six kills under their belt already. Time to get seven. _Number seven, here we come_ , Marco thinks, and his will and resolve focuses their consciousness, and they start walking, the whole weight of the Jaeger on their limbs, wading through the water.

Ten miles out, they see it, the kaiju glowing green and blue and dark scales, swirling around in the ocean, and rising out of the waves to meet them. _Are we good to go?_ And Jean looks over at Marco and chortles— _Marco, do you need to ask that question? Of course I am._ And they grunt and throw a punch with their right arm, and Jean puts his shoulder into it, just like Shadis at the Academy trained him to— _YOU GOTTA PUT YOUR ENTIRE BODY INTO IT—_ and the kaiju howls and splashes the ocean viciously. They punch, and they punch, and the kaiju rams them with its head, but they slam it down and blow it back with three precise shots from the left arm cannon. The kaiju brays again and sinks down underneath the dark green surface, frothy in the storm.

“Number seven, huh,” Marco says glancing over at him, leaning on the control panel, breathing hard, and Jean grins back at him, his pants synchronized with Marco’s, and the feel-good sensation of winning a fight floods his system. _Number seven. We did it._

“Jean, Marco, we’re still getting a kaiju signature!” Erwin’s voice bellows, and Jean’s heart skips in surprise; he barely hears Erwin yelling about how the kaiju is on their right, at four o’clock, and their Jaeger is slow to respond to the kaiju rising out of the water, its maw gaping and lined with long, vicious fangs. Marco yells, even though his thoughts are loud and clear in Jean’s mind, but Jean still hesitates for a fraction of a second, and that is all the kaiju needs. The Jaeger responds slowly to counter the kaiju’s attack, too slowly, and Jean feels the midsection of the Jaeger crush like it is gripping and tearing into his own abdomen, the kaiju’s teeth sinking into his gallbladder and appendix and liver. They howl the agony in unison, Marco’s scream cutting into the heartstrings in Jean’s chest. _WE HAVE TO FIGHT,_ Marco’s voice resonates, or is it Jean’s? It must be Marco’s, Jean would hardly think something like that; Marco is the one who thinks those thoughts in the dark times. Jean thinks them too, but the inception takes place in Marco’s head, fiery and brave and _good_. Jean follows, and the Jaeger swings its left arm to plasma cannon Deviant full in the face, but it is too late. Deviant pulls back, and roars again, its teeth dripping blue with toxic blood, and it lunges, this time for the head. Atlas Reaper’s cannon goes off too late; the kaiju has already bitten a hole in the Conn-Pod.

“ _Fuck!”_ Jean yells, and the fear creeps under his skin, sending cold shivers that intensify when the rain pours in through the hole. “ _Fuck!”_

Marco is breathing hard and deep, and he looks at Jean, the fear in his eyes the same fear that paralyzes Jean’s muscles, the pain in his stomach the same that grips Jean’s, the desperation the same that Jean feels slipping from his fingers. “ _Jean!_ ” he yells, barely audible through the bellow of the storm, “ _Jean, we have to—”_

And he is gone, ripped out of the harness easily as slicing through half-melted butter, and suddenly emptiness in Jean’s consciousness, and parts of his vision start to fade black, and Jean screams again,  _NO_ , and his chest ties itself into knots, and his arms tighten with double the weight of iron and engines and gears and sparks, and he wants to collapse, but Deviant is back, and the tears are spilling out of his eyes, stretched wide to prevent him crying, _but like that’s doing so much good_. He locks his hand into a fist by his side, _weapons engage, plasma cannon powering up,_ and he grits his teeth, it’s so slow, and the kaiju has opened his mouth and it’s getting closer, it’s going to tear another hole in the Conn-Pod— _no, not again. NOT AGAIN._ Jean is breathing hard, and he punches with his strength, and the cannon fires, and fires, but the kaiju refuses to go down, and roars again. _Why_ , Jean cannot stop crying, the tears run on their own, and he swings his arm to punch the damn thing in the head, desperate and splintered into pieces, _WHY. WHY MARCO. WHY NOT ME. TAKE ME INSTEAD, DAMN IT._

But he has to kill this kaiju, for Marco, for Marco’s fear and pain and slipping grip on control, the calm still water of their drift churning and breaking from the turmoil underneath, and so he swings his arm again the other way, backhanding Deviant in the face, screaming all the while because he can’t stop; all that pain, grief, despair, all of that has to go somewhere, but the more he screams the more it builds up in his chest—he punches the kaiju again, and shoots the kaiju again with the shot in the cannon and then it finally goes down, a weak cry before it is dead. Erwin is yelling into the radio “ _What happened? Atlas? Atlas?_ ” but Jean is numb, and the Jaeger is such a heavy thing. Jean tries to walk, but the pain above his hip splits his side, and he groans; the tears are still flowing. Maybe if he died, it would stop. It would stop.

 _No,_ the Marco in his head says, and Jean reaches out, praying, hoping, but there is just an emptiness, and it is all an illusion. _An illusion. All an illusion. It’s not real._ But Jean is a broken man clinging to illusions, and Marco smiles to him, and it hurts Jean so much, it hurts so much. _Please stop it,_ he says to Marco. But Marco does not go away. _You do not die for your friends. You live for them._

And Jean, desperately trying to choke back his tears, turns around and heads for the icy shores of Anchorage, every step a heavy weight that he cannot shake off, every step a burning brand of pain into his muscles until he is sure that they will split in two, every step an immense pressure crushing his head, and he screams, _STOP, MAKE IT STOP_ but he keeps walking, and he cannot stop, because he has to, he must. He is not a person for musts; he understands duty but never like Marco did, and only now the true load of what it means to do what must be done squeezes his entire being, with only one word falling out of his lips. _Marco. Marco. Marco._ The shore looms ahead, and when his knee reaches the beach, Atlas Reaper collapses on the ice, and Jean is thrown forwards into the screen-visor of the Conn-Pod, the pain still blazing every inch of his nerves and skin and heart, and crawls out into the snow, the cold numbing his fingertips. He stumbles out, his legs caving until he falls on his side. Voices are yelling, he cannot tell who they belong to; hands are reaching out to him, lying him down on his back, but he does not know whose hands they are. His eyes struggle to stay open, the black threatens to close him up, and he sees maybe a white light in the distance among the black.

 _Marco?_ he whispers weakly. _Marco?_

“Marco?”

And Jean opens his eyes.  His face feels wet, and he touches his cheek to discover he’s crying, the kind that simply happens, when the tears just run, and all he can do is sit there and let them run because there are too many to hold in his eyes. His chest is not painfully heavy. There are only tears. He sits up, straining to see in the shadows. “Marco?” he says into the dark. “Marco?” And maybe Marco might answer him; it is a foolish hope, but Jean sees nothing else. _Bring him back, please_.

There is movement and a slight creak from the bunk above Jean’s head, and instead of Marco, Eren is standing on the floor next to the bunk, his eyes searching in the darkness. “Jean?”

“Marco?” Jean says, because that is the only thing he can say right then, that is the only thing he can think right then, how much it hurt—no, how much it _hurts_ right now, how much his chest squeezes and his shoulders ache like he is still carrying Atlas Reaper all the way back to Alaska, back to land, back to white snow and rocky ground. “Marco?”

“Jesus _Christ._ Jesus fuckin’ Christ—Jean…” Eren comes a little closer, one hand braced on the bar of the bunk. “Jean, what the fuck happened?”

His voice drops with a more than a trace of concern. Jean has nothing to say to that. Eren comes a little bit closer, sitting on the bed next to him, their hips touching.

“Jean, hey, look, it’s okay, I’m here,” Eren says, and leans in and reaches an arm around for a hug, but Jean slaps him away. The tears run faster down his face, and he scrambles to get away from Eren.

“Don’t—don’t—don’t, please,” he pants, the pain and anger bubbling in his chest. “Don’t—don’t—”

“Are you okay?” Eren withdraws his hand. “Talk to me.”

“I can’t!” Jean says, and he covers his face and tries to even his ragged breathing. “I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I—I can’t, I _can’t,_ Marco… Marco, _Marco—”_

“Jean, shh, shh, it’s okay, look you don’t have to say anything—”

“It’s all the same,” Jean bursts out. “God damn it. God damn it.”

“Shh, shh calm down, it’s okay. I’m here.” Eren’s voice shakes a little bit, but his hand reaches out and rests on Jean’s shoulder. It’s more comforting than Jean expects, and his breathing slows a little bit—the tears still run madly but his heart doesn’t pound so quickly anymore, and he takes his hands off his face and leans back and closes his eyes, and tries not to think, but it still hurts so much. Eren squeezes a little bit, and Jean puts his hand over Eren’s without thinking. He just needs to calm down. Just calm down. That’s right.

He looks back at Eren, and Eren is looking at him with open eyes and a question— _Do you want to talk?_ And Jean doesn’t know if there is anything to talk about, because he doesn’t feel like there is anything to talk about, and he can see it in Eren’s eyes. Eren knows. Eren’s felt it. The memories, the feelings, the pain, they’ve shared it in their short unsuccessful drifts, and Eren sees it, and Jean—Jean’s been careless. He doesn’t have enough control over himself to rein it in; he doesn’t give enough shits to rein it in. But he gives enough of a shit to look into Eren’s eyes and believe in that trust between them, that trust that let them drift so well, the trust that lets Jean relive his past so vividly and realistically.

And everything is the same. Everything—Moblit’s voice on the radio alerting him to the kaiju signatures, Marshall Smith’s piercing blue gaze surveying the Jaeger bays, his co-pilots Bert and Reiner horsing around just like old times, Atlas Reaper in all its newly renovated glory gleaming in the glow of flying sparks, the Shatterdome with its high-arching domes and concrete walls and bustle of people and trucks and supplies—it’s not even the Anchorage Shatterdome, but they all look the fucking same, there is no difference. Even their drivesuits look the same as the ones he wore five years ago, maybe with less wear and less tear, but the same color with the PPDC logo on the shoulder plates and the spine piece and the helmet and everything. And the only thing that is not the same as Jean’s past is the person standing beside him in the Conn-Pod, the person whose mind he’s melding with, and that makes all the difference.

“Jean,” Eren says quietly. “It’s not all the same.”

Jean looks up. His face is still wet.

“I might be different from Marco, but you’re different too, Jean.” Eren grips Jean’s shoulder a little more tightly. “You’re different. Before you had Marco to split the burden with, but now you’re trying to carry everything by yourself, you’re trying to bear all the pain by yourself. But you already messed that up,” Eren adds with a soft smile. “You let me in.”

“I fuckin’ what now?”

“You drifted with me, horseface. And you helped me get out of my jam.”

Jean stares at him, a little bit in shock, but Eren’s right. Eren is right. He’s seen it, in the chaotic rush of memories that accompanies the drift—days at the Academy where Eren sat by himself soaking in bitterness, nights where Eren laid in his bunk and thought about how small he was next to the kaiju, next to the Jaeger, how all his strength was built up for absolutely nothing because nobody could drift with him, not even Mikasa, whom he’d known for nearly half his life, who chased after him desperately to protect him. But he didn’t need protection, he clawed at it until he broke free, until the Academy split them up because it was interfering with their training. And then he was left alone, floating by himself, the kid who ran his mouth off about killing the kaiju, a rage that had burst out with flames at the beginning and then quelled into a quiet contained force that isolated him.

And Jean remembers, in a clear memory in the drift: on the day Eren was to leave the Academy, Marshall Erwin Smith approached him and asked him _Are you willing to trust me on this?_ And Eren said _Yes sir, what do you take me for?_ And the Marshall looked him dead in the eye and asked him _Are you willing to trust a stranger so much that you completely reveal your entire self to them?_ And Eren stopped to think. He had not thought to drift with a stranger, because he knew everyone at the Academy so well, and he would not hesitate to trust them with his entire being, but a stranger, a stranger? But it so happened that Jean is not a stranger to him. Not even at the beginning. Eren might have been a stranger to Jean, but Jean was no stranger to Eren, not Jean Kirstein, one of the greatest pilots of the Mach 3 days, practically unstoppable until after Deviant emerged and advanced on Anchorage, and he disappeared. In some cases, it is worse than a stranger, because they differ so much, Jean the thinker and Eren the doer, but their first drift was electric and exhilarating and freeing. They were the same, they _are_ the same. The loss, the pain, the anger, the emptiness: all the same, and Jean looks into Eren’s eyes and sees the flicker of recognition and— _understanding,_ and Jean’s heart jumps. He doesn’t expect that. He doesn’t expect anything about Eren Jaeger at all. But he still—he still trusts Eren, enough to let him see that pain he’d been carrying, and Eren is right, he’d been trying to hold it all in, trying to carry it all himself, and it is so heavy, the memories and emotions are so heavy and his heart aches from the burden.

“You helped me,” Eren says. “And I trust you. And I just—I’m just asking you to trust me.”

Jean feels something in his chest give, like the weight of the sky is being lifted, like he is free to fly, the floodgates are open—if he thought he was crying hard before, it is nothing like now. He leans forward and nests his face in Eren’s neck, and Eren puts a hand on the spot between Jean’s shoulder blades and another in Jean’s dirty blond hair.

“It’s gonna be okay,  you chode,” Eren says. “Just let it all out. It’s okay to cry.”

“I’m not crying,” Jean mutters, but Eren laughs, the vibrations feel nice, and Jean cannot help but smile. His hands are so very warm, his neck smells so very good, and Jean feels whole.

And when he lifts his head to look at Eren again, Eren takes his face in both of his hands and kisses him on the mouth, electric and heart-racing and heart-stopping, and Jean feels invulnerable. Nothing can stop them now.

***

Eren is the one who breaks it off, startled by the loud clanging of someone banging on their door.

“Jean, Eren, are you awake? Get up, you’re being deployed!” Armin’s voice snaps Jean’s eyes open, and under his hand, Eren’s heart skips a beat. They make eye contact, and there is something flickering behind Eren’s eyes, something keen and driven, and they stare at Jean hungrily, like they may never see him again.

“Wait, wait,” Jean furrows his eyebrows. It makes no sense—they haven’t even had any successful drifts at all, not yet. They are last in line to be deployed. What happened to the others? _What happened?_ He recalls Levi being injured the other day after the last one attacked, a careless injury during training, and he remembers something about one of the other Jaegers still being repaired, but Bert and Reiner? Erd and Gunter? What happened?

Eren senses the worry in Jean’s head and hardens his mouth into a firm line. He puts his hands on either side of Jean’s face. “Stop worrying. We are in this together,” he says fiercely, but the doubts still leaks into Jean’s chest.

“But what if—”

“ _No,_ ” Eren insists. “We live together, we fight together, and if we have to, then we die together.”

“What about the other pilots? Why aren’t they sending the other pilots?” Jean furrows his eyebrows. “It doesn’t make any sense. Unless—”

“That’s not important.” Eren touches his forehead to Jean’s. “There are ten million people depending on us. We have a duty to fulfill.”

He kisses Jean again, short and warm and longing, and eases off the bed, shuffling to the closet. Jean watches him, the anxiety starting to creep through his fingers and toes. He can’t lose anyone again. He can’t go through that pain again. He can’t walk through life with an empty hole shaped like Eren in his chest. He can’t wake up screaming after nightmares that seem too painfully real to be just a dream. Even now Marco’s screams echo distantly in his head, and it squeezes his heart to remember them. God forbid that he had to deal with this again.

“Jean. Jean, come on. Get dressed.”

Eren is standing in the doorway, looking at him. Jean’s head is spinning in a mess of memories and images, and Eren seems unreal. No, the whole thing, being back at the PPDC, sitting on a bunk just like the one he’d slept on with Marco, standing in the same Atlas Reaper and walking through the ocean, with a different man by his side, none of it seems real. He closes his eyes and imagines that if he kills himself, maybe he would just wake up, like in that movie he’d watched in high school.

“ _Jean_.” Eren kneels in front of him, and takes his hands. “Jean. Marco might be dead, and my mother might be dead, and Erd and Gunter might have died out there, and Reiner and Bert might have died out there, but we can’t let their deaths be in vain. They might be dead, but”—Eren’s voice hardens—“the value of their lives is something we can’t let go to waste. We have to fight. We have to push through and fight. Do you hear me, Jean? Don’t let Marco’s death be in vain.”

Marco would want that. Marco was the kind of person who was willing to die for something worth fighting for, and here is Jean shaking like a leaf and having a green little shit tell him what the worth of death is. No. He’s not going to let Marco’s death be fruitless. He’s not going to do that. He looks into Eren’s eyes, and something clicks.

“Okay,” Jean says. “Okay.”

Armin is pacing impatiently outside, and as soon as Eren and Jean come out of their room, he exhales a quick “Hurry!” and starts running towards the bay. They chase after him while he rattles off information.

“Kaiju codename is Ryujin, category four—”

“Category _four_?” Eren chokes out.

“What’s going on? Why are we being deployed?” Jean pants. “What happened to Helios Ruby and Zero Epsilon? I thought they were taking care of this one.”

“Bertholdt and Reiner are out of commission; their Jaeger’s too damaged to do anything else—”

“Are they okay?” Eren says.

“They’re fine, they were transported back to the Shatterdome, but the Jaeger isn’t. As for Zero Epsilon,” Armin pauses, and looks away. “Well, things didn’t turn out too well.”

 _They’re dead_. The implication hangs heavy, and Eren and Jean exchange glances; despair and fear and grief rush through them briefly, but Jean must not let himself get carried away. It doesn’t matter that Erd and Gunter never looked on them unkindly in Jean’s whole time here, that they were the best and most entertaining during drunken charades, that they treated Jean and Eren like brothers. No. They’re gone now, and Jean cannot afford to think about that too heavily. The tears do not flow when they stand to get suited up; he’d run out of them. He is not vulnerable anymore. The screaming has ended.

The Drift is silence. Stay in the Drift. _Stay in the Drift,_ he mutters, a reminder both to Eren and to himself, but it’s redundant, Eren’s eyes are already calm and focused, in place of its usual fiery burn runs a fierce current, like one grabs the unsuspecting stray foot and whisks them away in the ocean a matter of seconds, a deadly force that Jean feels running through his veins too, and they submerge into the drift like that, a calm state of focus, melded with each other and only one thing in sight. _Let’s go,_ they think, and they drop into the ocean, the waves churning around Atlas Reaper’s huge mechanical knees. Eren is ready and pumped, _get the blood flowing, bring him down, make him pay_. They put their hands up as the kaiju rises out of the sea to meet them, a long scaly neck and an elongated head and glowing eyes and fins dotted all over its body. Jean blinks, and flashes of Deviant and its huge teeth and eyes blazing with scarily human intelligence burst from his memory. _Jean!_ Marco yells, his voice straining and panicked, _Jean, we have to—_

“Jean!” Eren yells, and Jean snaps his eyes onto the screen in front of him, the kaiju is rushing at them with an open maw glowing kaiju blue, and they swing Atlas Reaper’s right fist into its head, grunting while Ryujin groans and throws its head back, slamming it down on Atlas’s head. The sparks start raining down from the top of the Conn-Pod, and as Ryujin rears its head back again, Jean’s vision warps: Marco is screaming next to him, there is a hole in the Conn-Pod, and fear paralyzes Jean’s limbs, grabs him steadily by the abdomen and sends him trembling, and he can only watch in horror as Marco is ripped out and sucked into the storm outside, going from an unshakable presence in his head to a flailing figure in the rain drowned in the ocean. He screams, but no one can hear him in the chaotic roar of wind and rain and waves.

“Jean, _stop it!_ ” and Jean looks over and suddenly Eren is the one who is being ripped out of the Conn-Pod, and Jean feels an empty hole again, and he can feel tears threatening to spill over, and he screams, _Not again, not again, please not again!_ And the powerful underwater current twisting through the ocean that is Eren’s drift is gone, and Jean is drowning, flailing in the drift, the control of the Jaeger is now solely his again, and he doesn’t want it, he can’t carry that burden of Atlas anymore, running back to shore with his tail between his legs. It’s so heavy, the weight of the sky. So heavy. His shoulders ache, and his neck aches and he screams, but no one will hear him. His voice does nothing. No one will help him, he is alone, he always will be, because the kaiju will always take everyone from him and he is powerless to stop them—

“ _Jean, snap the fuck out of it, it’s not real!_ ” Eren’s indignation cuts through Jean’s reality. Eren is alive again, he is supporting him, they are sharing the neural load. Atlas’s arms don’t seem so heavy now. That’s right. Eren’s there. He’s not alone. He doesn’t have to bear it alone anymore. They will fight back. _I’m not gonna let your death be pointless, Marco._ And beside him Eren remembers his mother too, but without pain, only a fierce desire to take down the monster in front of them.

“Remember our fight!” Eren says, and Jean remembers, as Eren’s fist came down, how he used that momentum to smash Eren’s nose bleeding. Understanding passes between them, and as Ryujin’s head comes down to smash them, they move and grab it by its fins and slam it into the ocean.

“Load the cannon!” Jean tells Eren, but Eren has read his thoughts clearly because he’s already on it, and they lock Atlas’s left plasma cannon and fire, and fire, and fire, until the clip is empty. Ryujin sinks into the sea, braying and groaning as it goes, music to Jean’s ears. Eren is breathing hard next to him, exhilaration running through both of their bodies, but they mustn’t let their guard down—Jean remembers the hole in the Conn-Pod from five years ago, Marco flung out like a fleck of dust into the storm, but he does not latch on. He cannot afford to latch on. Eren is depending on him, and Hong Kong is depending on him. He inhales and exhales slowly.

“He might not be dead,” Jean says. “We have to stay on guard.”

Eren’s silent agreement echoes in their neural handshake, and they position themselves again. Jean’s heart is racing, but it is not out of fear, not anymore. _Bring it on, motherfucker._ Whose thought is it? Neither of them know. Neither of them care. They’re ready to bring this fucker down. For Marco. For Carla. For the people in the city running for their lives unable to escape. For Erd and Gunter, for Franz and Hannah,  for Thomas and Mina, for Nack and Milius, and for all the other pilots who died fighting the kaiju. _You  messed with the wrong people._

Ryujin lunges up in a flurry of waves and sea foam, screaming in its otherworldly cry, lunging for Atlas’s chest, but they are ready, their other arm cannon is loaded, and they fire again, right into its open maw. The kaiju screams, and Atlas shudders from the recoil, and Eren and Jean stumble in their harnesses, teeth gritting and clenched, _let’s finish this motherfucker!_ They move in, wrapping giant iron fists around Ryujin’s neck, and pulls. Eren yells like he is throwing karate punches, and Jean redoubles his concentration: _we can do it. We’re almost there. Almost there._ With one last bellow of effort, they wring the kaiju’s neck, breaking its bones, and it falls limp into the ocean with a final groan.

“We did it,” Eren breathes after a pause, leaning on one of the consoles, and Jean looks over and meets those blue-green eyes. “We did it.”

Eren grins, and Jean’s chest skips a beat. “Yeah,” he says, laughing a little bit. “Yeah. We did it.”

 _We did it._ They disengage from their harnesses and tear off their helmets, and Eren stumbles to Jean’s side and wraps his arms around his copilot. _We did it. We did it._ Eren is maybe crying into Jean’s drivesuit and maybe laughing into Jean’s drivesuit. “Stop crying,” Jean says.

“I’m not crying, motherfucker,” Eren mumbles, but Jean is laughing, and Eren is laughing, and it’s over. He kind of really wants to kiss Eren right now, but first—Jean closes his eyes. _Marco, you there? We did it. We got number eight._ And from somewhere, maybe inside his own lunatic head or from maybe somewhere else, Jean can hear Marco laughing, and for once it doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t remind him of the weight of the sky crushing his head from the inside.

It had been five years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: I was going to publish this earlier but then Fire Emblem happened gOD what a good game buuuut on another note
> 
> WE MADE IT KIDS. I spent _so long_ thinking about this story and talking about this and imagining this and listening to Two Steps From Hell songs while imagining this and watching Pacific Rim every day for a week for research and reading Travis Beacham's entire ask tag for research and [takes a breath] we're finally here. Thank you so much for reading thank you so much for leaving kudos and comments and bookmarks I am so very happy you are all wonderful every single one of you. EVERY SINGLE ONE. I hope you find twenty dollars on the ground.
> 
> Shoutout to Parmida for being my wonderful beta and for letting me drag her into the abyss that is Jean/Eren and Pacific Rim and to Anthony for helping me think of Jaeger names. (I think 80% of the Jaeger names were his. Rock on, kid.)


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